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Waterford Hotels and Inns, Inc. was founded in 1985 with a specific objective in mind. The goal was to provide management and consulting services from the hotel owner's perspective, a unique concept in an industry frequently driven by the interests of the management company.
Michael Hraba is the owner of Hraba Hosptality Consulting, hired to help Waterford Hotels and Inns with their social media strategy. Following is the unedited article that Michael wrote for the December issue of Hotels Magazine based on his experience using Revinate for The Allison Inn and Spa in Oregon’s wine country.
I am wholly skeptical of most options to quantify the subjective review world. Most of the time it's a giddy start-up comprised of engineers that don't understand the hospitality business. Often, the available solutions cause more problems or force insincere interaction with your community. I have been quite happy managing online reviews "the old way", meaning one site at a time and constantly being overwhelmed by the amount of data that can amass when you look away for a moment.
Luckily, I stumbled onto Revinate a number of months ago. Revinate is a San Francisco-based technology company that is helping hotels and management companies manage their online reviews and social media. Unlike other social media solutions out there, Revinate is focused exclusively on the hospitality industry. The team is comprised of hospitality folks who know what we need and how our business works. They do a lot more than just monitoring and reporting on what is being said. They are data centric and are actually creating a qualitative STR report for online reputation, social media mentions, interactions, etc. The presentation of the data is elegant, simple, and accessible. It's also something you can customize depending on what you need to see. For example, you can view information about your property and immediately click on a competitor to see their information benchmarked against yours. You can slice and dice to get information on ratings, recommendations, social media buzz, review frequency, and more. The analysis that Revinate provides is unbelievable.
Our hotels actively monitor and respond to all online commentary, be it a review, blog post, tweet, or other mention somewhere in the social stream. Revinate provides us with a single dashboard to see all our reviews in one place, and even links us directly to the review site so we can respond without having to search for the review. By actively monitoring the keywords that show up often in our reviews we can begin to see trends around what people like most and least about our properties. For example, at The Allison Inn and Spa, our breakfast and large bathrooms are big hits with reviewers. If we were to receive a neutral or negative review, we would use those results to make operational improvements and retrain staff as needed.
Having Revinate compliments our traditional monitoring with Market Metrix and traditional comment cards. Unlike the others, however, Revinate gives us a real time pulse of what people think about our property after they have left, and at times, even while they are still in house. If you can capture something like that, you can add a little surprise and delight into a guest's stay. It's an incredible opportunity to dazzle guests, as well as resolve potential issues or brewing trouble. No more waiting a week or two for survey results - we now have access to real-time data that allows us to make changes and react quickly, before those little issues become real problems.
For me, the most powerful tool is the corporate reporting - it allows us, as the ownership, to track best and worst property performers across all key online review and social media metrics. Revinate is aggregating every single bit of information online, and finally quantifying data from the elusive subjective and qualitative world of online reviews. Some of this data not only helps you make small changes in operations at a property level, but it could also show management groups what brand flag to fly or who might deserve recognition based on improvements. We finally have encapsulated this wiley world of 2.0, and it's made my life easier, and made my number-hungry hotelier peers settle down with solid metrics that make sense. Revinate helps people understand a world they previously thought inaccessible.
The leaders in hospitality service and social media all seem to have chosen Revinate, and I am sure the rest will follow.
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