Revinate Success Story: Pan Pacific Hotels Group

 

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The Pan Pacific Hotels Group portfolio features 28 premium hotels, resorts and serviced suites across Asia, North America and Oceania. Pan Pacific ® is a leading brand in Asia and the Pacific Rim with hotels offering premium accommodations and services. PARKROYAL® is a collection of comfortable leisure and business hotels and resorts located in the heart of cities and interesting locales across Asia Pacific.

In mid-2011, Angie Ho, Vice President of Online Marketing, asked her colleagues in Seattle to start looking for a software solution that would help the properties manage their online reviews and social media mentions.  While one of the properties had been using an automated solution, the other properties were manually checking online reviews, a process that wasn’t comprehensive or efficient.  Knowing that a better solution than the one in use must exist, the team went to work.

With headquarters in Singapore, Angie surprisingly looked to the US for a solution. She says, “It is very apparent that social media marketing is more mature in the states than the Asian market so I wanted to make sure that we were on the cutting edge of technology and trends. In comparison to some of the products I’ve seen I find Revinate feature-rich and technologically advanced.”

However, there are different review sites in Asia than there are in the US so Angie wanted to ensure that a US-based company could monitor the sources of content important in their regions. Revinate, which has always made comprehensive global review site coverage a core priority, fast-tracked the coverage of sites specifically requested by Pan Pacific Hotels Group.

Also critically important to Pan Pacific Hotels Group was that the software service be easy to use and intuitive since Angie wanted to ensure wide adoption, both at corporate and on site.  She says, “Realistically, I know that if we give the properties tools that aren’t simple to use, they just won’t use them. So an intuitive software that is easy to pick up was high on the list of requirements.”

The team evaluated several solutions and ultimately selected Revinate. The team was particularly impressed with the sentiment analysis solution, which they felt was an effective way to segment customer reviews and would help them deep-dive into problem areas and better understand what guests like and don’t like at the individual properties and across the brand. And, Revinate provided their hotels with the opportunity and the tools to take action at a much greater level than other application they were evaluating.

With vendor selection complete, Pan Pacific Hotels Group and Revinate worked on a roll-out plan to  their properties on not only Revinate, but also on best practices around responding to reviews and engaging on social media.

With a dedication to training and support, Revinate set up multiple trainings to support all the different time zones of the properties. The support team also ensured that the team members all had the right corporate view, depending on their brand and location. Angie notes that she often gets great sales support during the sales process, but it tends to fall off after the sales. She says, “Revinate has proven itself to really care about its customers, providing quick turn around for support tickets and direct lines of communication at any time.”

Six months into using Revinate, Angie is quick to point out how much the properties and corporate staff love using Revinate. But more importantly, they are already seeing great results. As a result of Revinate, the hotels have a greater awareness of how they’re doing in guests’ eyes, and they’re able to react quicker when issues arise to improve loyalty and sales.

The hotels pay particular attention to improving their ranking on TripAdvisor’s Popularity Index since they have seen financial benefits as a result. Angie explains, “Top ten hotels bring in significantly more revenue than other properties so we strive to have all our properties rank high through great service and detailed attention to reviews. And, since results get rolled up to the executive team, recognition for a job well done is a great incentive.”

Comments

[Richard Hughes]

The internet and social media seems to be an increasingly important business tool. By spending a little to have someone manage their social media presence, the hotel was able to increase their revenue, which goes to show how powerful it is.

Interesting article.