‘INDIAN HOTELS SLOW IN UTILISING ONLINE DOMAIN’
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With improved social reputations, hotels’ overall performance improves. As a result, a stronger online reputation allows a hotel to increase its prices while maintaining the same occupancy levels. Agreeing with the fact that awareness among Indian hoteliers about online marketing is still in nascent stage, Brian Payea, Head of Industry Relations, TripAdvisor for Business, said that most Indian accommodations aren’t taking advantage of the valuable opportunity to improve their reputation.
“Only 5 per cent of Indian properties listed on TripAdvisor have responded to user reviews in the last 30 days. With page views for India accommodations on the rise across all TripAdvisor domains, we encourage business owners in India to take control of their online reputation by monitoring their reviews and engaging with their past and future guests,” he adds.
Responding to a question over how review sites help customers to plan their travel, he opined that review sites have revolutionised the average traveller’s approach to planning and booking a holiday. A recent independent study conducted by PhoCusWright on behalf of TripAdvisor revealed that more than half of global respondents do not want to make a booking commitment until they read reviews and find out what other travellers thought about a property.
“In the case of India, TripAdvisor users are most likely to avoid booking hotels with no reviews. Indian users also exhibit above-average engagement with the site: 68 per cent of Indian respondents indicate that they have written a review in the past year because they feel they are a part of TripAdvisor’s social community, versus 47 per cent global average,” he revealed. TripAdvisor receives 260 million unique visitors from India and hoteliers and other business owners have the opportunity to leverage their online presence to enhance their brand’s reputation.
For incremental revenue, TripAdvisor offers a premium subscription-based service called Business Listings, available for accommodation owners who wish to increase direct bookings from their TripAdvisor page. “Several hotel brands in India, such as the Hyatt Hotels, Taj Hotels & Resorts, The LalitSuri Hospitality Group, The Park Hotels, and a large number of independent properties, have already upgraded to Business Listings to drive more bookings and gain more visibility through the product’s powerful special offers and mobile upgrade features,” he informed.
Shedding light on ensuring the authenticity of the user generated content, he said that TripAdvisor’s main thrust is to provide an accurate and useful picture of the businesses and destinations. “We use sophisticated automated tools and algorithms that can see patterns of activity, using best practices from a variety of industries, such as credit card and banking agencies, and we back that up with a team of over 200 content specialists, who work 24/7 to maintain the quality of our reviews,” he said and added that reviews are so important that more than half of respondents (53 per cent) at a recently conducted survey will not book a hotel that does not have reviews.
He further recommended ways for hoteliers to engage with past and potential customers. The top five management response, according to him, are: respond quickly to every kind of review; tone is important, whether the review is critical or glowing; make note of positive changes; be original and show gratitude, build goodwill.