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BDL Management is the UK’s largest multi brand and hotel management company for both branded hotels as well as unique standalone hotels. Specializing in developing and managing hotel assets for owners, BDL has built 30 hotels (3,850 rooms developed) and presently manages 45 hotels.
BDL began using Revinate in March 2012 after a thorough evaluation process of Online Reputation Management solutions. Nik Gupta, Commercial Director at BDL Management, explains, “We spent about nine months closely evaluating software solutions for managing online reviews and social media. It was new territory for us and we wanted to be sure that we didn’t leap into a contract before we were sure that we had found the perfect solution for us.”
After numerous calls, trials and demos, Nik began to focus on Revinate. Of critical importance to him and the team was ease of use. He says, “I really wanted to make sure that our solution was straight forward, even for our non technical staff. Revinate was the clear winner in terms of usability and design. I was confident that anyone, at any property, would be able to use Revinate and find it immediately valuable.”
The other factors that went into the decision to select Revinate were its industry-leading sentiment analysis, strong competitive analytics and price. Nik says, “When we looked at all the vendors and the functionality and quality of the products, Revinate was at the top of the list.”
The rollout and training process went without a hitch. Nik kicked off the process with immediate interal communications to get the hotels excited about the benefits of using Revinate. All the hotels were starting to recognize the impact of online reviews to sales and reputation and they welcomed a solution that would help them manage guest feedback and engagement. Nik says, “The rollout process was incredibly smooth thanks to the account management and training team at Revinate. We had everyone up and running in weeks, which was further proof that we chose the right solution.”
Having utilized Revinate for three months now, Nik is seeing the positive impact that Revinate is having at the hotels. He has received great feedback from all properties and he regularly sees Revinate reports used in meetings to share feedback and drive operational improvements. In addition, he sees that more hotels are paying close attention to reviews and responding to feedback. He says, “Now that everyone has access to Revinate, staying on top of reviews and responding to reviews has become easy versus a time-consuming chore.”
To further operationalize the process of managing online reviews, BDL has created standard operating procedures around Revinate metrics and plans to include goals in future scorecards and as part of the financial review process. BDL’s focus on these metrics proves that online review metrics are quickly becoming as important as more traditional metrics used to measure hotel performance, such as occupancy and average daily rate.
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