Thursday 5 September 2013

How Dialogue adds great value for even the best hotels

with thanks to Institutional Investor

 Your hotel is doing everything right: and you have a great online reputation. Where can Dialogue add value?

Even the very best hotel knows that it loses guests to its competitors. Why? because no hotel can please 100% of its guests 100% of the time.

With Dialogue it can!

How?

By ensuring that the few guests who might not be overjoyed can have whatever issue that made their stay less than perfect - room issues, staff issues - addressed. 

Guest retention is not just about running a great hotel and hoping the guest will return, it's about having a mechanism that the kind of guest who might write a 3* review on TripAdvisor (but almost certainly wont bother*) will use to communicate to the hotel what they need to do to retain their custom.

One of Dialogue's key functions is to make it very easy (and attractive) for that kind of guest to (a) communicate what the hotel needs to do so they'll stay again and (b) just as easy for the hotel to reassure them.

We see this all the time as we monitor conversations between our hotel clients and their guests through Dialogue: guests frequently comment:

"I'd stay again if" - the room was larger, the reception staff were more welcoming, I could have a room with a certain type of facility. All issues easily addressed by the hotel - in private, through Dialogue.

And at the end of the conversation the guest (who was almost certainly about to drift away to a competitor when the conversation began) almost always says: "I look forward to returning".

And there's a hidden bonus: even if a very few of those '3*' guests would have gone on to write a review on somewhere like TripAdvisor have been deflected from doing so - your online reputation will get even better.

*It is easy to be misled by numbers on TripAdvisor. Suppose your hotel gets as few as five 3* reviews a year: we estimate that they represent one in about fifty of your guests who hold that opinion - that's 250 guests who, if the issue that made their opinion '3*' isn't addressed, won't be coming back.

It's why the top hotel in London (according to the industry's most respected guide) has just adopted Dialogue!

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