Friday 2 August 2013

Is your hotel's reputation worth as much as a chocolate on the pillow?

Often when we quote a hotel we express the cost of Dialogue in terms of 'pence per room night' 

Last week a client said to one of our membership advisers: "why wouldn't I value my hotel's reputation above a chocolate on our guests' pillow?" and it struck a chord.

Why indeed? 

We compared the two, and guess what?

They cost the same!*

Dialogue costs between 4p and 9p a room/night (depending on your room rate). How much are you spending on chocolates?  


*And that's for ONE chocolate - if you give guests two (or more) Dialogue's relative cost falls even further!

2 comments:

  1. Why don't Hotels respond? Well you might had never heard this answer, but I have analysed that there might be a language barrier. Well if TripAdvisor could launch its site in local languages, thing might be different.

    Regards,
    Jatin - Manager at www.mghworld.net

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yes Jatin, but there is an issue for all of us here. The key, of course, is the language spoken (or written in) by the guest. This is often not the local language, and it's this that gives rise to the issue for the hotel. So (and we rarely say this) it's probably not an issue for TripAdvisor.

    We see mangled responses all the time (as I'm sure you do) and these put other hotels without language skills off responding altogether. We're lucky here in London, we have access to fluent speakers of almost every language on the planet.

    At the end of the day every hotel has to look at its online reputation and decide what resources it's going to commit to managing it. In-house or contracted-out. As we say in this post - we charge a maximum 9p a room/night for all our services. Is it worth that to ensure that your guest is thanked for posting a great review (in whatever language)?

    P.S. Don't anyone be tempted to use Google Translate to post responses. It's fine for reading reviews, but some of the worst 'mangling' of a hotel's reputation can result if it's used to post responses!

    ReplyDelete

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