The Revinate Blog

Revinate Recommended on HospitalityNet

In an article on HospitalityNet, Doug Kennedy recommends Revinate as a new tool for measuring hospitality and guest service efficiency. He says:

"Another great new tool for measuring guest satisfaction is offered by a company called Revinate®. Their system monitors all the major online guests review and social media websites, allowing managers to log-in to see all of the postings, versus having to call the different networks. More frequent monitoring of these websites sometimes reveals postings that have just recently been made, perhaps by a guest who is still in their room who can be contacted right away for resolution. Best of all, it also aggregates the feedback posted online so that managers can easily identify reoccurring problems guests are experiencing. Managers also can respond to online guest reviews from Revinate, which most electronic marketing consultants highly recommend doing. www.Revinate.com"

Read the whole article here.

Revinate Success Story: The Roosevelt Hotel

Thanks for checking out this Revinate Success Story. You may download a PDF version of this article. Please check out additional success stories, and contact us for more information about Revinate.

For a classic New York City hotel experience, nothing comes close to The Roosevelt Hotel. Opened in 1924 at the height of the Jazz Age, the "Grand Dame of Madison Avenue" continues to impress guests in its prime location at Madison Avenue and 45th Street in midtown Manhattan.

Kelli Crean is the e-commerce manager at the hotel. Always looking for new technologies that can help drive sales and loyalty, Kelli heard about Revinate from the social media gurus at the Roger Smith Hotel, widely known as leaders in the industry and passionate Revinate users.

Prior to Revinate, Kelli spent a lot of time monitoring and responding to reviews by visiting TripAdvisor, Expedia, Hotels.com and other review sites. With more than 1000 rooms and a program to encourage reviews, the hotel often gets upwards of 100 reviews of month. With a policy of responding to both positive and negative reviews, Kelli spent the good part of the day reading and responding to reviews without being able to see key trends or track success.

When she began using Revinate in October of 2010, she immediately saw the ROI. She says, “In addition to saving me a significant amount of time by bringing all the reviews into one dashboard, the reporting features are incredible. It was great to be able to see that the work we put into encouraging reviews is paying off. We consistently blow away our competition in review frequency. And, being able to do keyword searches is already helping us make operational improvements. For example, we are able to see just how many people feel the bathrooms are too small and can now base any renovation efforts on a proven need. Finally, being able to see our competitions’ activity in social media is incredible helpful. The business intelligence that I get from Revinate definitely helps me do my job better.”

While Kelli is the most active user of Revinate at the hotel, all departments benefit from the weekly scorecard that is mailed out each week. Kelli says, “Online reviews and social media are such hot topics in hotels today. It’s great to have a simple report that I can share with everyone to show how we’re doing.”

Revinate Clients - The Best in Social Media

This morning Gadling announced their top 10 social media superstars in travel. Gadling selected the ten companies based on their great Twitter programs. I was thrilled to see 2 Revinate customers, Charles Hotel (@charleshotel) and Hyatt (@hyattconcierge) on the list.

Please check them out and cast your vote.

If you're just getting started with Twitter, you can learn a lot from the way these hospitality companies actively engage with prospects and guests. In addition to offering Twitter specials, Charles Hotel helps the community find cool places and things to do in the area and warmly engages people who mention they will be coming to the hotel. Hyatt also does a great job making guests feel welcomed and helping with property questions and service issues.

Want to become more active on Twitter? Check out our Hoteliers Guide to Twitter for more helpful tips.

Creating a Business Case for Revinate

Since launching last year, Revinate has grown quickly thanks to many key influencers at hospitality companies that saw the product and made it their mission to get it adopted across the organization. Seth Godin calls these folks 'sneezers'. Sneezers are the people that tell others about products, thereby creating an 'Ideavirus'. Sneezers are often critical to growth as it is said that 10% of the world influences 90%.

Revinate is a product that demos very elegantly and sells itself well. Anyone who has been tasked with manually finding and responding to reviews immediately understands how much time and effort Revinate will save. As these folks start to tell others about Revinate, they are often hit with the question, "what's the business case?" In an effort to help our sneezers promote Revinate, I wanted to provide some information and industry stats that clearly show why Revinate is a necessary investment.

Online reviews are the most disruptive force in the hotel industry since OTAs.  There have been dozens of great stats published lately about how influential online reviews are for travelers, but the one that I love, because it speaks to the business case, is this stat from PhoCusWright's study, "Social Media in Travel: Traffic & Activity": People who visit online reviews before visiting an OTA or hotel site are more than twice as likely to book. Good reviews make people go from lookers to bookers. 

Google and ITA Back in the News as Kayak IPO Announced

Last summer, Google announced it would be acquiring ITA software for 700 million dollars. ITA software is used by some of the world's most successful travel companies, including American Airlines, Southwest Airlines, United Airlines, Continental Airlines, Bing, Kayak, and Orbitz. Essentially, it controls the data that makes airfare searches possible by processing and publishing airfare-related and travel search data. 

Yesterday, Kayak announced plans for an Initial Public Offering. Since ITA powers Kayak's air search, one of the IPO risks is that Google will launch an airfare search product that competes directly with Kayak. Another risk is that Kayak licenses its faring engine software from ITA. In fact, according to Kayak, ITA "provided approximately 42% of our overall airfare query results for the nine months ended September 30, 2010." That contract expires at the end of 2013.

With the online travel industry vehemently opposed to ITA-Google deal, it is unclear whether it will be approved by the Justice Department. What it means for the Kayak IPO is also TBD.

How to Stand Out on TripAdvisor

The other day I spoke with a journalist from the USA Today who is writing a story about TripAdvisor's influence on consumer travel. She had already spoken to many consumers who say they throw out the overly positive and the overly negative reviews and focus on the rest. Given this fact, she asked us how consumers can differentiate among the hotels. What should they be looking for in reviews to find a good hotel?

In my opinion, consumers should be looking for management responses to reviews. A hotel that takes the time to respond to reviews is clearly customer focused and cares about the guests' experiences. With so few hotels taking the time to respond to reviews, I think it's an excellent way to shine and differentiate your hotel from the masses.

For those that wonder whether responding to reviews leads to sales, here's a review on TripAdvisor that clearly shows that review responses can lead to bookings. Daphne Bernstein writes, "I travel to Chicago on business frequently and have stayed at several Marriott properties in the area. I really like the Blackstone, but decided to stay at the Courtyard for this stay for one reason - I was very impressed that the marketing director took the time to comment on each TripAdvisor review. Once I got to the hotel, I found the service to be exceptional in all areas."

Many hotels wonder which reviews to respond to. I am a firm believer in responding to all negative reviews. Responding to a negative review allows you to show the world, not just the reviewer, that his/her experience was an anomoly and you have noted the problem and will take care of it. Do people read review responses? Yes! In fact, a spokeswoman for TripAdvisor, Amelie Hurst, says there is anecdotal evidence that a hotel's handling of a negative review can have a greater impact on travellers' impressions than the review itself.

Should you also respond to positive reviews? Yes. I think you should respond to as many as you can as long as you can personalize the response so it doesn't sound canned or trite. Take the time to thank people for their feedback and for chosing your hotel. Let them know that their kind words will be shared with the staff. Pull out something from the review to highlight. For example, "I'm so happy you loved the concierge's recommendation for dinner. John has been with us for ten years and knows all the gems in the city."

If you're not yet responding to management reviews, perhaps now is the time to start. If you need some help getting started, take a look at our Hoteliers Guide to Review Sites and Forums for ideas.

Revinate Featured on TNooz

Revinate is featured today on the Tnooz Website in the TLabs section, where they are showcasing travel startups.

The interview focuses on how Revinate got its start, who is at the helm, the challenges that the service aims to solve and how we measure success.

Click here to read the full article.

Revinate Success Story: Hilton Hotels

Thanks for checking out this Revinate Success Story. You may download a PDF version of this article. Please check out additional success stories, and contact us for more information about Revinate.

Hilton Austin

Hilton Austin is an 800-room property that caters to both business and leisure travelers. At the end of July, 2010, the staff began using Revinate to manage their online reviews and social media mentions.

Prior to Revinate, the staff was solely focused on TripAdvisor reviews and would log in to TripAdvisor every few days to read and respond to their reviews. While the team did have access to another tool prior to Revinate, it was less intuitive and had limited functionality.

Today, the sales and marketing team, in addition to the General Manager and Director of Front Office, actively uses Revinate to manage the hotel’s online reputation and to respond to reviews. According to Joanna Demeo of the sales and marketing team, “Revinate has definitely driven us to be more active with all review sites, not just TripAdvisor. In fact, using the Reviews Overview Report we were able to see that only 20% of our reviews were coming from TripAdvisor. We were essentially unaware of 80% of what was being said about us on the other sites such as Priceline, Hotels.com, Expedia, etc.”

Revinate on Stage at The PhoCusWright Conference.

Today is a big day for the Revinate team. Kyle Duffy and Marc Heyneker are at PhoCusWright's Travel Innovation Summit, where, earlier this morning they presented on the big stage in front of a live audience and a panel of judges.

Like any socially connected start-up, we tracked their progress on Twitter. We knew they were about to go on stage when we saw this tweet:

#revinate taking the stage at #phocuswright; "hotel mission control for social media."

Once they got started, it started to get exciting, with dozens of tweets about the presentation. Here are just a few:

#revinate has more focus than trustyou, if I was a hotelier, which I am not, I think I'd roll with them. Consumer space=distraction.

#phocuswright #revinate this should be a popular tool for hotels since most property owners are obsessed with Tripadvisor reviews good idea

#revinate is a pretty neat b2b tool for hotels. #phocuswright

And when the presentation ended, Kyle was put in front of the 'Critics Circle' for American Idol-like feedback. As expected, the feedback was positive:

Critics Circle at #phocuswright give support and kudos to Revinate for their hotel reputation mgmt solution

More updates to come...

 

 

Learnings from TripAdvisor's Master Class in NYC

Our East Coast Sales Director, Seth DeHart, attended TripAdvisor's Master Class in New York today and shared some useful tips and tricks from the session.

The site continues to grow and flourish. In fact, 21 reviews are written per minute on the site. The average rating on the site is a 3.9, with the following distribution.

1 Star Reviews 9%
2 Star Reviews 8%
3 Star Reviews 11%
4 Star Reviews 27%
5 Star Reviews 45%

When it comes to management responses, 60% of management responses are for positive reviews. TripAdvisor encourages management responses... as does Revinate. It's the best way to shine on the site!

TripAdvisor allows owners to set up a free business listing that can be updated as frequently as desired. For example, a New York hotel can change the listing to market itself as the best hotel for watching the Thanksgiving Day Parade. And then it can be changed to market itself as the best hotel for Christmas shopping. Currently, only 15% of hotels have completed their business listing,

TripAdvisor is also touting the importance of photos. The hotels who have 20+ pictures of their hotel on TA receive 150% more unique hits then hotels with few photos.

TripAdvisor continues to encourage hotels to solicit reviews. The representative explained that fresh content is an important factor in the algorythm that determines a hotel's market ranking. In addition, fresh content can help drown out any negative reviews or older content. But TripAdvisor made it very clear that they do not want to see computers set up to capture reviews in their lobby or business center.  They monitor for reviews coming from the hotel's IP and look at them carefully to ensure they were written by a guest and not a hotel representative.