Managing Guest Satisfaction Surveys: Best Practices
Effective Management Response Strategies for Reviews & Surveys
GUIDE
Managing Guest Satisfaction Surveys: Best Practices
Index
Introduction 3
Why Respond to Guest Feedback 5
What to Consider When Defining a Policy 8
Recommended Approach & Objectives 17
About Us 24
Managing Guest Satisfaction Surveys: Best Practices
Introduction
Managing Guest Satisfaction Surveys: Best Practices
Responding to guest feedback is one of the most
challenging and time-consuming tasks that hoteliers face.
And it’s not getting any easier. In addition to direct
feedback via surveys, more feedback than ever is being
shared publicly on review sites and social media channels,
in multiple languages.
How you respond to guest feedback can have a
significant impact on guest perceptions, behavior and the
overall success of your hotel. If feedback is poorly
managed, guests may not return to your hotel and could
share their disappointment with others which will in turn
affect your property or brand’s reputation.
Before tackling responding to feedback, it’s important to
have a clear management response strategy in place.
Hotels and hotel brands should set goals and priorities,
communicate these to teams, allocate resources and
develop the relevant skills across the organization.
In this guide, we’ll look at what to consider when defining
a policy and suggest possible approaches based on our
experience, studies and best practice. Whether you are
defining the strategy for a global hotel chain or an
independent property, the framework outlined in this
guide will help you to find the most effective solution for
your brand.
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Introduction
Managing Guest Satisfaction Surveys: Best Practices
Why Respond to Guest Feedback
Managing Guest Satisfaction Surveys: Best Practices
Whether it’s an online review, a guest survey or a
comment at checkout, a guest’s experience is impacted
by how a hotel reacts. By responding to guest feedback
you have the opportunity to:
• Thank guests
• Show that you are listening and you care
• Change perceptions
• Explain and reassure
• Clear up misinformation
• Reinforce the positive
• Be accountable
• Say how you’re following up
When feedback is well managed and responded to in a
timely and correct manner, guests will feel more positive
about your hotel.
But your hotel’s response to feedback can influence not
only the satisfaction of the guest leaving the comments,
but also the perception of your brand in the eyes of
potential future guests.
Effectively managing direct feedback from surveys or
face-to-face exchanges helps to reduce negative reviews
and encourages guests to talk positively about their
experience online or to friends and relatives.
The main reason for responding to online reviews is that
it helps to sell the hotel. Public responses are not only for
the benefit of the guest who left the original review but
also for the potential bookers who are searching online.
You wouldn’t ignore the phone if you knew a guest was
calling to complain. The OTAs are a channel, just like
email and phone. In the consumer’s mind there is little
difference.
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Responding to Guest Feedback Matters
Managing Guest Satisfaction Surveys: Best Practices7
Higher Ratings & More Booking Inquiries
According to research from TripAdvisor, hotels have even more reasons to respond to online reviews:
• Properties that don’t respond to reviews have an average rating of 3.81.
• Properties that respond to at least 40% of reviews have average rating of 4.05.
• Properties that respond to at least 50% of reviews increase likelihood of a booking inquiry by 24%.
Source: Tripadvisor.com/PressCenter
Managing Guest Satisfaction Surveys: Best Practices
What to Consider When Defining a
Policy
Managing Guest Satisfaction Surveys: Best Practices
A management response strategy will differ depending on the
size of the hotel / hotel brand and the resources available as well
as the nature of the guest feedback.
When defining your brand’s policy, it is important to first clarify
your objectives. What does your hotel want to achieve from
responding to guest feedback?
Once the overall objectives are clear, there are several
components that hotel management should consider :
• Online Reviews vs Surveys
• Speed vs Quantity
• Negative vs Positive Comments
• Corporate vs Hotel Level Response
• Multiple Languages
• Competitor Behavior
• Setting expectations through responding
Guidelines for Responding to Guest Feedback
Whether it’s an online review, a guest survey or a comment at checkout, your response to guest feedback is critical.
In this webinar, we’ll show you how to respond to guest feedback in a way that leaves travelers feeling positive about your hotel, improves reputation, and drives higher room demand.
Watch Webinar
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Defining a Management Response Policy
Managing Guest Satisfaction Surveys: Best Practices
Online Reviews vs Surveys
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Public or private?
The key difference is that reviews are public (both the guest comment and your response) whereas surveys are private (both
the guest feedback and your reply). In many cases responding to reviews should take priority over responding to surveys.
Reviews: Responding to online reviews is an opportunity to not only resolve situations with guests who have already checked
out, but gives hotels the chance to attract future guests. A good response can act as a marketing tool to convince travelers to
choose your hotel so it’s important to choose your words carefully to create a positive impression. Avoid standard answers
wherever possible since travelers can easily spot when the same management response is being copied and pasted again
and again.
Surveys: Survey feedback is responded to in a different manner. Since the response is private, using response templates can
be particularly helpful to increase efficiency and save time. Even though hotels cannot respond to post-stay surveys until
after the guest has checked out, responding quickly to negative survey comments is critical as it allows the hotel to try and
find a solution before the guest decides to write a negative review online. Responding to in-stay surveys is more like
responding to a phone call. As the guest is still on property, follow-up may need to be more personal such as phoning the
guest in their room. The advantage is that the hotel has the opportunity to resolve the issue before the guest checks out.
ReviewPro’s Case Management solutions enable hotels to efficiently manage service recovery to increase guest satisfaction
and reduce negative reviews.
Managing Guest Satisfaction Surveys: Best Practices
Speed vs Quantity
Hotels are frequently responding by the total amount of
responses rather than the time taken to respond. An
objective of responding to 100% of reviews quickly results
in a no win situation. Staff will never see the top of the
mountain and risk burning out.
The inefficiency of responding to all reviews has been
proved (one study by Cornell is summarized on the next
page). If managers set objectives to respond to 100% of
reviews, then sometimes responses are only published
two or three months after the actual review has been
written.
This is often counter productive as resources are spent on
responding to old reviews and the likelihood of these
being read is low due to the age of the review.
It’s time to lift hotel staff out of the drudgery of
responding to all reviews and all guest survey feedback. It
is likely to be more impactful to focus on responding as
quickly as possible to the most relevant comments, rather
than trying to respond to all feedback over a long period
of time. For in-stay surveys, it is even more obvious that a
rapid response time is critical.
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“ Most travelers don’t look beyond the ten most recent reviews. The faster you respond, the better your chances of converting them.”
Daniel E. CraigFounder
Managing Guest Satisfaction Surveys: Best Practices
The Cornell Study
Most travelers don’t look beyond the ten most recent reviews. The faster you respond, the better your chances of converting them.”
• The image above taken from the Cornell Study shows how the Dubai market has been responding to a higher percentage of reviews, yet the average score for reviews is lower.
• The study states that “We anticipate the impact of managerial responses not to be strictly linear, that is, responding to some reviews may be beneficial, but perhaps that impact decreases as hotels start to respond to all reviews”.
Source – Cornell University – Hotel Performance Impact of Socially Engaging with Consumers
• The graph on the left shows the impact of responding to reviews on TripAdvisor on revenue.
• The study states that “The practical limit for the proportion of review responses seems to be about 40 percent. After this point, incremental increases in review responses become detrimental, and revenue declines”.
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Managing Guest Satisfaction Surveys: Best Practices
Negative vs Positive Comments
Generally speaking, when considering management
response objectives, hotels should focus on any negative
feedback first.
Responding to negative reviews tend to take priority over
neutral or positive reviews as they often call for an
apology or clarification. Whether or not you are able to
contact the reviewer directly, posting a response to
negative feedback shows readers that you regret the
situation and have made efforts to resolve it.
When your hotel receives negative feedback via surveys,
you should take action to limit any damage it may cause
to your hotel’s reputation. As already mentioned, resolving
issues identified through in-stay surveys should be top
priority. For post-stay surveys, one way of fixing objectives
is based on the Net Promoter Score®. For example, an
objective could be to reply to all “detractors” within 48
hours.
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Negative Reviews
• Aim to respond quickly.
• Offer a sincere apology.
• Address the key issues.
• Provide an explanation.
• Say how you are following up.
• Be professional.
• Personalize the response.
Positive Reviews
• Thank them – they’re your advocates.
• Share the excitement: “We are thrilled …”
• Keep responses varied by commenting on specifics.
• Say you look forward to welcoming them back.
• No need to respond to all positive reviews!
Managing Guest Satisfaction Surveys: Best Practices
Corporate vs Hotel Level Response
Hotel Response
Whether a hotel level response is possible ultimately
depends on the volume of reviews. There are many
benefits of a hotel level response for both the hotelier and
guest.
Not only is a hotel response from a General Manager
more direct and genuine, hotel management knows the
property better and can therefore respond faster giving a
more precise response.
Corporate Response
Corporate responses make sense in certain scenarios and
it depends on the situation as well as the size of group.
It is important that corporate is involved and supports the
hotels where necessary. A key function that corporate is
often responsible for is the creation of a strategic
response policy including objectives, guidelines and best
practices.
Some brands find a “hybrid” solution effective whereby
responses are managed by the individual hotels but in
high season or when staff are unable to respond on time,
the response is escalated to corporate to manage, for
example through the group custom service center.
The corporate team can also provide valuable support in
terms of language coverage.
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Managing Guest Satisfaction Surveys: Best Practices
Responding in Multiple Languages
It is important to respond in the language that the
feedback was written in to ensure a personalized
response.
The ideal way to manage this is with multi-lingual team
members. With ReviewPro’s Auto Case Management,
cases can be created automatically and alerts sent to the
relevant staff member based on the language of the guest
comment. If a language is not covered at the hotel level, it
could make sense to escalate the response to corporate.
Response templates translated into multiple languages
can help to some extent (ReviewPro offers this option for
both ORM and GSS). It is important to make sure that the
team knows how to adapt them where necessary. We
recommend not relying on machine translation services
for responses. If you can’t respond professionally in the
same language, it may be better not to respond at all.
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Managing Guest Satisfaction Surveys: Best Practices
What Are Your Competitors Doing?
The last crucial part of your management response
strategy is to look at your competitive set and how they
are responding to guest feedback.
Are your competitors replying to a higher percentage of
reviews on important channels than you are? How
quickly do they respond? How does your average
response time compare?
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Source: ReviewPro
Managing Guest Satisfaction Surveys: Best Practices
Recommended Approach & Objectives
Managing Guest Satisfaction Surveys: Best Practices
Response Policy for Reviews
There is no “one policy fits all” that will fit every hotel or
chain, however the following approach can be used as a
base for defining your review response strategy. It can
then be tailored to fit your organization and overall brand
strategy.
• Don’t feel obliged to respond to all reviews! Prioritize
reviews that call for an apology or clarification, are
damaging to reputation or highlight positive aspects
you wish to draw attention to.
• Think “speed before quantity”. Focus on responding as
quickly as possible to the most relevant reviews, rather
than trying to respond to all reviews over a long period
of time.
• Concentrate on the most influential sites and channels -
those that are the most important for your target
audience or generate the highest revenue for your
hotel.
• Although it makes sense for corporate to define
response strategy, dedicate resources to be able to
respond on a hotel level whenever possible. Using a
hybrid approach can work well to manage escalations
or overflow during peak season.
• Try to respond in the language of the review. This is
typically an area where corporate can provide support.
• Remember that reviews are public so if you choose to
use response templates, make sure the message is
adapted so that it does not look like a “robotic” answer.
Responses should provide helpful and meaningful
information.
• Provide staff with training and clear guidelines for
responding to reviews. Your review response policy
should also include how to deal with false reviews,
fictitious claims or a review threat. For more details, see
our guide on managing brand attacks.
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Managing Guest Satisfaction Surveys: Best Practices
Example of Objectives for Reviews
Remember not all sites offer the option to respond to
reviews. Objectives should be based on “respondable”
reviews rather than total review volume.
Here is an example of appropriate objectives for
responding to reviews:
• 100% of negative reviews in key languages
• 25% of neutral reviews with comments
• 25% of positive reviews with comments
• Within 72 hours
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Source: ReviewPro
Managing Guest Satisfaction Surveys: Best Practices
Tracking Performance for Reviews
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Another key part of your management response
strategy should be around tracking and managing
your performance. In the ReviewPro Management
Response center, you can monitor the following:
- Volume of respondable reviews
- Response ratio
- Average response time
- By review source
- By positive/neutral/negative
- Relative to the competition
It is also useful to create a “view” (as shown in the
screen shot) of negative reviews that have not
been responded to. This helps the person
responsible for replying to reviews to prioritize
responses.Source: ReviewPro
Managing Guest Satisfaction Surveys: Best Practices
Response Policy for Surveys
When defining a survey response strategy, it is important
to keep in mind that unlike reviews, survey responses are
not public. We recommend the following approach:
• Once again, don’t feel compelled to respond to all
surveys. Give priority to those surveys where a response
is required such as because the guest had a negative
experience. This can be based on NPS® “detractors” or
a low overall satisfaction score (the figure will depend
on the scale used).
• Reply as quickly as possible to the surveys with the
most relevant feedback. By removing the pressure of
reaching a 100% response rate, your responses will be
quicker and more likely to have a bigger impact.
• Many times, your guests may provide feedback in
surveys and wait for your response prior to sharing their
experience online. A timely and effective response to
surveys can therefore still have a positive impact on
your Online Reputation.
• When it comes to in-stay surveys, speed is definitely of
the essence and a telephone call is often the fastest
and most effective way of following up with the guest.
• As for reviews, survey response strategy can be defined
at corporate level but respond on a hotel level
whenever possible, using a hybrid approach when
applicable.
• Again, try to respond in the language of the review,
asking corporate for support when necessary.
• As responses are not public, using templates can be
extremely useful and increase efficiency.
• Use it as an opportunity to encourage customer loyalty.
Identify highly satisfied guests or promoters and using a
template, send them a thank you email with a welcome
back discount on future bookings.
• Provide staff with training and clear guidelines for
responding to survey feedback.
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Managing Guest Satisfaction Surveys: Best Practices
Example of Objectives for Surveys
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Appropriate objectives for responding to post-stay
surveys could be:
• 100% of negative responses in key languages
• 100% of promoters (using a “welcome back”
template with 10% discount on next booking)
• Within 72 hours
For in-stay surveys the focus should be speed so that
issues can be resolved quickly. For example:
• 100% of responses saying they have an issue
• Within 2 hours
Managing Guest Satisfaction Surveys: Best Practices
Tracking Performance for Surveys
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In the ReviewPro Management Response center,
you can monitor the following:
- Volume of surveys to respond to
- Response ratio
- Average response time
- By positive/neutral/negative
- By NPS® (Promoters/Passives/Detractors)
It is also possible to track whether guests found
the response from the hotel useful or not.
Source: ReviewPro
Managing Guest Satisfaction Surveys: Best Practices
About ReviewPro
Managing Guest Satisfaction Surveys: Best Practices
About Us
ReviewPro is the leading provider of Guest Intelligence solutions
to independent hotel brands worldwide.
The company’s suite of cloud-based solutions includes Online
Reputation Management (ORM), Guest Satisfaction Surveys (GSS)
and Auto Case Management which enable clients to obtain a
deeper understanding of reputation performance as well as
operational/service strengths and weaknesses. Leveraging Guest
Intelligence effectively allows clients to increase guest
satisfaction, rankings on review sites/OTAs and revenue.
The company offers the industry-standard Global Review
IndexTM (GRI), an online reputation score, which is used by
thousands of hotels worldwide as a benchmark for reputation
management efforts, based on review data collected from more
than 175 online travel agencies (OTAs) and review sites in more
than 45 languages. More than 30,000 hotel brands worldwide
are currently using ReviewPro’s solutions.
Request a Free ReviewPro Demo now
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