Hotel Reviews: Introducing the Guest Review Rankings Report
Hotle Compete Releases Brand New Industry Resource for Tracking Review Performance
The hotel industry is currently obsessed with social media. It is particularly obsessed with guest reviews on sites like TripAdvisor and the major Online Travel Agency (OTA) sites. Review scores and volumes affect a hotel"s business, and – increasingly – executive compensation, as more and more hotel companies link general managers" bonuses to their hotels" performance on review sites. This week Hotel Compete is proud to launch the Guest Review Rankings Report. This brand new resource provides hotels, analysts and other interested parties a brand new perspective on review scores across major lodging markets.
The Untapped Opportunity of the Wisdom of Crowds
Hotels" social media capabilities have progressed considerably over the last couple of years, with Reputation Management the main focus of an increasing level of activity. But despite the great strides that hotels have made in interacting with reviews, the industry is still missing an analytical opportunity.
Industry wisdom has it that hotel review scores are unreliable, because reviewers tend to post reviews when they are either very happy or very unhappy with their experience in a hotel. But the data does not support that preconception. In fact, research shows that similar hotels in the same market tend to attract similar and consistent scores. Hence, over or under-performance relative to the average can have a significant impact on performance. If analysts can understand what constitutes average performance, and how hotels compare to that average, it can help to predict future hotel performance.
How to Keep Track of Hotel Review Performance
The challenge both for individual hotels and hotel analysts is that no good baseline exists for comparing hotel reviews across multiple sites. Different review sites use different scales, and gather responses and compile scores in different ways. To compare scores across sites is to compare apples with oranges, so market-level analysis tends to focus on individual review sites. Multi-site comparison can be done using one of the many analysis tools currently available, but it"s up to the hotel to select its own comp set. And anyone who reads this site knows our views on the shortcomings of hotel comp set selection.
It"s time for an objective way to compare hotel review performance on an "Apples-to-Apples" basis. Hotel Compete"s Guest Review Rankings Report has been designed to solve exactly this problem. This bi-weekly report – which is based on the top 25 US hotel markets – provides regularly updated Guest Review Rating scores for every single hotel in each market.
Hotel review scores are a great predictor of hotel performance, provided you understand them. The scores in this report are represented on a 1-10 scale, making it easy to compare properties in the same hotel class, as well as overall market rankings. Please visit the Hotel Compete Guest Review Rankings Report to learn more.
ABOUT HOTEL COMPETE:
Hotel Compete began five years ago, by CEO Jim Rozell, with the goal of changing the way hoteliers
thought about competitive positioning. The idea that every hotel had a static and relatively compact set of "true" competitors never set to HC. Their "booker eye view" of the market concept requires them to emulate how customers shop for hotel rooms. This approach allows Hotel Compete to apply a unique algorithm that assesses potential competing hotels, identifies the advantages a hotel has versus potential customers, and allows hoteliers to derive the value of those advantages in terms of rate and market position. Hotel Compete identifies a hotel"s "fair share" and discovers its opportunities to get more of it when it exists. Hotel Compete thinks like the customer. They collect the same data as them and formulate it in to a set of tools that help hotels generate increased revenue. They follow up with tools to monitor a hotel"s ever changing market position so that their customers don"t miss any new opportunities. For more information about Hotel Compete, follow them on Twitter (@HotelCompete) or online at http://www.hotelcompete.com.
