The Revinate Blog

Rethinking Traditional Guest Satisfaction

The Popularity of online reviews and the importance of social media are changing the way that hotels are approaching how to gather customer feedback. Historically, hotels have relied on extensive post-stay surveys and mystery shoppers to ascertain service levels, customer satisfaction, and areas for improvement. Today, online reviews are providing hoteliers with rich data about guest satisfaction to help them please customers. In addition, online reviews provide a social currency that drives new bookings and trust in hotels.

We can learn a lot from the growth of online reviews to determine better ways to administer and use survey data. First, and perhaps most obvious, online reviews are useful to both hoteliers and consumers because of their free-form structure that allows guests to talk only about the services and amenities that impacted their stays. With traditional surveys, primarily closed-ended questions such as “please rate your satisfaction with your room from 1 to 10” will not yield rich data about what a customer liked or disliked about, for example, his room, or who at the hotel made his hotel special. Rather, traditional surveys are formulated by hotels to focus on areas that they feel need to be measured, rather than what is most important and top of mind to customers.

The highly structured nature of traditional surveys used to be critical for accurately measuring and reporting on guest satisfaction but today new sentiment analysis technology makes it possible to easily analyze and report on unstructured data in just as reliable a way, with a much richer data-set. Through reports that show which topics, from ontology specific to hospitality, are trending positively or negatively, management doesn’t have to know what to ask in advance to find hot-button issues or get detailed feedback about any service or amenity on property.

With reliable reporting comes the ability to fully operationalize the data, even basing compensation plans on the results. Equally important, it allows you to bring voice of the customer data into your discussions around capital improvements, training programs and operational changes.

The second reason why many hoteliers are rethinking traditional guest satisfaction survey methods is because they recognize the value that public guest feedback has on new bookings. The TripBarometer Survey states that 93% of travellers worldwide say online reviews have an impact on their booking decisions. This trend, in addition to SEO benefits and the fact that TripAdvisor’s Popularity Index takes review frequency in mind, makes it clear that hoteliers should focus on driving guests to share feedback publicly, through social channels, to reap the best rewards.

For hoteliers that worry what will happen when survey feedback can be shared publicly, it’s time to accept the reality that your guests are already writing and reading online reviews, tweets and posts about your hotel at an increasing rate. Embrace the transparency as it drives consumer trust, allows you to connect with guests and access data not only about your hotel, but your competition. This competitive data can be easily mined to understand where you are winning and losing in guests’ eyes.

In April, 2012, the largest hospitality company in the world, Wyndham Hotels & Resorts replaced their traditional guest survey system with a solution that collects review style feedback directly from guests. The decision was based on extensive research and testing, and this bold move has successfully unleashed the power of feedback to drive marketing exposure and bookings, in addition to providing even richer intelligence. As a result, the hotels are benefiting from powerful insights about their guests that they can easily analyze with sentiment analysis technology, along with more public reviews, which is helping drive awareness of the hotels, in addition to popularity index scores.

For hotels and brands that believe in customer-centric approaches and aren’t afraid to rethink conventional solutions, Revinate, eCornell and Cornell University invite you to learn more about inGuest Surveys, Revinate's 360° approach to guest feedback. Join us on June 11th at 11am EST for a free Webinar with Cornell University’s Bill Carroll, PhD. Space is limited. Sign up here.

Revinate’s new inGuest™ Surveys Reinvent Guest Feedback, Turning Guests into an Army of Marketers

Revinate, the hospitality industry’s undisputed leader in reputation management, announces the launch of inGuest™ Surveys, creating the first true 360° approach to guest feedback. The new product, already in use by hotels across the globe, fully integrates modern, innovative guest surveys with Revinate’s market leading online review and social media solution. With over 20,000 hotel customers, Revinate is now helping hospitality businesses fully harness the power of guest feedback to improve operations, engage with customers and drive more bookings.

With inGuest Surveys, Revinate can now turn hotel guests into an army of advocates. Where solicited feedback was once considered only private intelligence, inGuest Surveys allows leading hoteliers to cash in the currency of feedback, using it to drive exposure and new bookings.

Feedback has always been the lifeblood of successful hospitality companies. The growing popularity of online reviews has shown that consumers prefer to write free-form reviews describing their hotel experiences. Reviews also provide hoteliers with a rich source of feedback that can be used to improve operations and, ultimately, guest satisfaction and loyalty. In fact, well over 90% of travelers worldwide say online reviews have an impact on their booking decisions (TripBarometer, March 2013).

With inGuest Surveys, Revinate improves on traditional post-stay surveying methods with an innovative, social approach inspired by online reviews. inGuest Surveys includes a customizable survey that is remarkably easy to manage and deploy. Revinate’s new product also allows guests to share their experiences on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. This social sharing not only appeals to today’s travelers, it is also designed to drive more online exposure and bookings for the hotel.  In addition, inGuest Surveys can also be easily and automatically published on hoteliers’ own web sites, improving site engagement, SEO and booking conversion rates.

inGuest Surveys is tightly integrated with reviews from online travel agencies and review sites across the globe, and analyzed with powerful yet intuitive sentiment analysis technology. This complete 360° view will help hoteliers quickly understand what guests love about the property and what needs to be improved, regardless of whether the feedback was published on TripAdvisor, booking.com or any other review site, or solicited directly through inGuest.

Jay Ashton, Revinate co-founder and CEO says, “Today more than ever travelers love to provide feedback, and they do so for two main reasons; to feel empowered and influence other customers, and because they genuinely want to improve a product.  Traditional surveys will only meet the second need.  A streamlined digital survey that is inspired by online reviews, and that has social-sharing capability, has more to offer.  It can meet the needs of hotels to ask specific questions and the needs of customers to influence other people, providing both critical business intelligence and online marketing exposure.”   

Kelly Wouters, DotCom Manager at The Hotel Brussels, has been using inGuest Surveys since March. She says, “After using Revinate for online reputation management and seeing the impressive difference that it made across our organization, I was very excited to use inGuest Surveys. By combining our unsolicited feedback from social media channels and multiple review sites with solicited surveys from verified guests, we now have an even more powerful solution for tracking what matters to our customers, allowing us to make impactful changes that impact guest satisfaction.  We can automatically share that feedback on our website and post it on Facebook and Twitter to increase conversion rates and drive more bookings. But, what’s really great is that we can now check all our customer insights in one place, making it very easy to take action and improve our service, which benefits our guests,” Kelly adds.

To learn more about inGuest Surveys, visit www.Revinate.com inguest and join our Webinar on June 11^th, in conjunction with Cornell University and eCornell. Sign up here.

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Revinate Becomes Newest Partner of Cornell Center for Hospitality Research

We're excited to announce that Revinate has joined the Cornell Center for Hospitality Research (CHR) at the School of Hotel Administration as a partner. Please see the press release that CHR has just shared to announce this exciting new endeavor below:

As part of the partnership, Revinate, which has developed industry-leading software for hospitality social media analysis and management, will provide key social media data for CHR research fellows. Revinate’s vice president of marketing, Michelle Wohl, will join the CHR’s Advisory Board.

“Partnering with Cornell creates an excellent opportunity to help the industry improve its understanding of customers through social-media analytics,” said Wohl. “Revinate’s software is used by more than 15,000 hotels, and I look forward to co-producing studies with Cornell’s research fellows, who will use that data for the industry’s benefit.”

“We are delighted that Revinate has joined the CHR and will offer its data for our researchers,” said Robert Kwortnik, CHR academic director. “We know that the industry is working hard to understand social media for measuring, monitoring, and managing the guest experience, and Revinate’s data will help with that effort. We're particularly excited about using Revinate's data to explore how well-managed social media can positively influence the hospitality operation and are excited about this tremendous opportunity to create new knowledge."

A unit of the Cornell School of Hotel Administration, The Center for Hospitality Research (CHR) sponsors research designed to improve practices in the hospitality industry. Under the lead of the center's 74 corporate affiliates, experienced scholars work closely with business executives to discover new insights into strategic, managerial and operating practices. The center also publishes the award-winning hospitality journal, the Cornell Hospitality Quarterly. To learn more about the center and its projects, visitwww.chr.cornell.edu.

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Announcing Instagram Integration in Revinate

Last year, we wrote about how hotels can benefit from engaging on Instagram. L2 reports that 82% of hotel brands have created a presence on the platform, with the majority of brands identifying Instagram as a social media priority for 2013.

For hoteliers that haven't been introduced to the application, Instagram is an online photo-sharing and social networking service that enables users to take pictures, apply digital filters, and share them on a variety of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. With over 100 Million users, knowing what Instagram photos your customers and prospects are posting about your property, your competitors and your market is a critical component of proactively managing your online reputation.

Instagram provides hotel marketers with an excellent opportunity to share professional and user-generated photos about their properties, and it is quickly becoming a popular channel for travelers to share their travel experiences.

Today, we are excited to announce that Instagram photos will now be included in Revinate search results. This feature is a major time saver as all of your hotel-related Instagram content will be visible to you without having to visit the application. When you click on your search tab in the Revinate dashboard to view your social media mentions, any Instagram results with a matching hashtag (#) will show up in the photos section. You can then click on the photo so you can comment and engage with the user, provided you are already logged into the application.

 

In addition to being able to view and comment on the photo, you will be able to save it, share it with colleagues via e-mail, add a ticket for a colleague to take action, share it on Facebook or post it on Twitter, all straight from the Revinate dashboard. Moreover, when you share the photo, its link is automatically shortened with our custom URL shortener, allowing you to measure and report on social media engagement metrics directly from our system. With this new integration now available to you, your proactive reputation management efforts will be even more comprehensive.

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2012 Revinate Hotel of the Year Award Winners

Today Revinate announced the winners of the 2012 Revinate Awards for online reputation management. Hotels across the globe were invited to submit nominations for “Hotel of the Year” by detailing their accomplishments, innovations and successes in online reputation and social media during 2012. Winners for other categories were determined by Revinate through an analysis of large sets of online review and social media data.

Michelle Wohl, VP of Marketing for Revinate, says, “With more than 15,000 client hotels across 120 countries, the competition was stiff. The strides that our client hotels made in 2012 are incredible. In addition to gains on TripAdvisor’s Popularity Index and improvements in average rating and review frequency, every day we witness clients exceeding goals around guest sentiment, competition, and even RevPAR growth.”

While Revinate works with properties and brands of all sizes, and in every segment of the hospitality industry, many of this year's winners are boutique, budget and mid-scale hotels. Kyle Duffy, VP of Strategic Accounts, says, “The fact that so many of the award winners represent independent, boutique and limited-service hotels is testament to how the industry and hotel priorities changed this year. Online reputation management is no longer important to just luxury or high-end properties. It is imperative to any hotel, anywhere in the world.”

The 2012 Revinate Award winners:

Revinate Hotel of the Year - The London NYC, New York, United States

Since signing up for Revinate in January of 2011, The London NYC, an independent luxury hotel, has improved its overall rating versus the competitive set, improved its reviews pace versus the competitive set, improved its rank on TripAdvisor’s Popularity Index from #51 to #37 and ended 2012 ranked #1 in RevPAR versus its competitive set. The London NYC is advised by Digital Marketing Works, who specialize in providing insights and solutions on how to maximize profits through digital channels. Read the complete story of  The London NYC's collaboration with DMW and their success in this post.

Revinate Hotel of the Year, Runners Up - Hotel Erwin, Venice, CA and Galleria Park Hotel, San Francisco, CA

Hotel Erwin has improved in all key online review and social media metrics from 2011 to 2012. The hotel has gone from #23 in January '12 on TripAdvisor's Popularity to #17 at the end of December. The hotel has also fully operationalized Revinate throughout the hotel. Deborah Pinkstaff, Revenue Manager, says, "Our entire staff has embraced Revinate and really made it part of our daily culture. All our employees, from line staff to managers, are aware of and take pride in our Revinate scores."

Galleria Park Hotel has also experienced gains on TripAdvisor's Popularity Index in 2012, going from#17 to #14 to end the year ahead of its compset. With 600 online reviews this year, the hotel exceeded its goals around review volume by 241%. The hotel's RevPAR increased 23% to date while the competition only increased by 11%. James Lim, Managing Director, says, "With all these positive metrics, employees feel that they had a positive impact on our online reputation and financial performance this year. Perhaps a coincidence - - our Work Climate in the hotel scored 90% overall. A great accomplishment."

Best Use of Revinate by a Management Company - Denihan Hospitality Group, New York, NY

Denihan Hospitality Group uses Revinate across its portfolio of 15 hotels in New York, Chicago, Washington D.C., and Miami. In her entry, Beverly Ramsook, VP, Revenue Management & Distribution, outlined how every department in the organization uses Revinate to guide decisions, from capital improvement plans to pricing.  The sales department also use Revinate reports in client meetings to show how the hotels fare against the competition in guest sentiment and quality scores. The marketing team regularly engages with guests and prospects using Revinate's social media engagement tools, which were extremely handy during Hurricane Sandy for monitoring the hotels with limited services.

Biggest Improvement on TripAdvisor Popularity Index - Surfcomber Miami-South Beach, A Kimpton Hotel, FL

Surfcomber Miami - South Beach went from 149 in Q4 of 2011 on TripAdvisor Popularity Index to 5, where they currently reside. That's 144 points in one year! Quite a feat for the competitive Miami market.

Biggest Increase in Review Frequency from 2011 to 2012 - The Milford, New York, NY

In Q4, 2011, The Milford received 561 reviews. They received 1315 reviews in Q4, 2012. With 754 more reviews, this was the largest gain of any client hotel for the year.

Best Overall Rating Against the Competitive Set - Super 8 Clearfield, PA

Super 8, Clearfield, PA dramatically beat its competitive set in 2012 by more than 2 points.

Biggest Increase in Review Frequency Against Competitive Set from 2011 to 2012 - Aria Resort & Casino, Las Vegas, NV

While Las Vegas hotels traditionally get more reviews than hotels in other markets due to the number of rooms and amenities, Aria Resort & Casino dramatically outpaced its comp set in 2012 when it came to review volume. The hotel received an average of almost 600 reviews a month. Its compset average received 40% as many or about 360 a month.

Congratulations to all the winners and best of luck in 2013!

Review Assistant: Improve Your Hotel or Restaurant Review Responses

We've all been there before. As the resident social media, public relations, guest services or reputation manager for your respective hotel, there is a requisite, time-sensitive (and time-consuming) responsibility to address and respond to the majority of consumer reviews that come flooding in about your property. In most cases, this process demands first scanning the review for specific feedback to address, then liaising with your operations team to clarify any additional feedback to include in your review response, and finally laboring over the perfect response to publish which, by its very nature, can become repetitive and fairly standardized in parts. After all, there are only so many inventive ways to thank a past guest for contributing a review on xyz review site. 

If you've parterned with Revinate, you already know that the scanning and liasing steps to this review response process are easily accomplished by utilizing Revinate's
'Actions' tab on the dashboard. Excitingly, we have taken the assistance one step further by launching a new feature that makes that final, time-consuming step of response creation just a bit easier.

Revinate's new Response Templates is a core feature of the new Response Assistant, now available to customers. With these Response Templates, Reinate Administrators can now load response templates into their Revinate accounts, which not only helps their respective teams follow brand guidelines with management responses but also saves valuable time. These templates are:  

• -Organizable by folders and recommendations for different kinds of reviews, whether they are positive, neutral and negative in nature.  
• -Easy to access and personalize as you and other users prepare and submit your responses.
• -Fully integrated with Revinate's workflow ticketing system. When a Revinate user assigns a ticket to a team member, he/she can also recommend templates within the system as the team collectively collaborate on responses.

Once a few of these Response Templates are prepared and available for users, our Review Assistant toolbar seamlessly guides Revinate users through the process of selecting the right template for each respective review and also alerts our review tracking system once the review is posted in real-time so that you, as the user, know which reviews have been responded to even before the response is posted publicly by the review site. With many review sites taking several days or even weeks to post a management response, this new "Responded To" feature within the Review Assistant will significantly improve your workflow and efficiency when it comes to reputation management. 

While we cannot understate the time-saving value the Review Assistant will afford, these new product features, particularly the Review Templates, will not replace the requisite need for crafting customized management responses to reviews. As we've written many times before about responding to online reviews, a completely cut-and-pasted public response will only make your customers less likely to book. Consequently, employ the Review Assistant features for exactly what they are: aids to your reputation management efforts. 

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Revinate Goes Global

Revinate Goes Global with Increased Language Support and Regional Offices to Answer Growing Worldwide Demand for Online Reputation and Social Media Management

Revinate Adds 12 of the World’s Most Common Languages to Upgraded Platform; New Release Supports Growing International Customer Base Featuring Top Global Brands in 120 Countries

San Francisco, Calif.—November 5, 2012—Revinate, the new standard for guest satisfaction for the hospitality industry, announced today that its online reputation management platform analyzes social media content in virtually any language and is now available with 12 additional interface languages to support its rapidly growing global customer base. With customers in 120 countries, Revinate’s new product release will be supported by the company’s growing international presence, with offices opening in Amsterdam, Sydney and Hong Kong.

As the leader in online reputation management for the hospitality industry, Revinate is expanding to meet demand for localized versions of its product by customers worldwide. Revinate’s interface is now available in Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Thai and Turkish, providing multi-lingual capabilities for customers servicing global clientele in all regions of the world. Additionally, Revinate aggregates and analyzes guest feedback in virtually any language, and can automatically translate user-generated content so that hoteliers can listen to guests no matter where they come from.

“Truly understanding the needs of our customers and being able to improve guest satisfaction is the top priority in our business,” said Chetan Patel, Vice President, Strategic Marketing & E-commerce, ONYX Hospitality Group. “With the new multi-lingual support combined with Revinate’s regional offices in Asia and Europe, we can more effectively extend the power of the Revinate platform to our properties around the globe. The result will be a new level of customer engagement that wasn't previously possible, allowing us to better deliver on our pledge of top-notch customer service.”

New language options are an important product upgrade not only for Revinate’s larger customers, including global management groups, international hotel chains and resorts, but also for independent and boutique hotels in any region of the world.  

“Listening to customer feedback and innovating based on their needs is as important to Revinate as it is to their hospitality businesses,” said Jay Ashton, co-founder and CEO, Revinate. “Our customers, which include many of the world’s top global brands, have asked us to bring the power of Revinate to more properties around the world, and we’re answering that demand. Today, we can help hotels and hospitality companies manage their reputations and better engage with their guests worldwide.”

With more than 15,000 properties worldwide, this global product release is just the latest milestone for Revinate in a very successful 2012. In July, the company announced that it received $14.5 million in financing from Benchmark Capital and Formation 8 to fuel further growth.

About Revinate

With online guest-generated travel reviews increasing in both number and importance, hotel owners and operators have a simple choice: either ignore the explosion of social media and hope for the best or proactively track and manage what is being said online in a way that deepens customer relationships, strengthens brands and boosts revenue. If you opt for the latter, then Revinate’s user-friendly software platform, custom-designed for the unique needs of the hospitality industry, is an irreplaceable tool. Revinate’s powerful technology monitors all of the important social media venues – including Twitter, Facebook and TripAdvisor – and provides instant alerts whenever your property or brand is mentioned. With information comes power: in this case, the power to please a disgruntled customer, monitor the competition and set yourself apart when it comes to guest satisfaction and loyalty. Based in San Francisco, Revinate counts the world’s leading hospitality brands as clients. To learn more, please visit www.revinate.com.

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Revinate Receives $14.5 Million Series A Financing

Today, Revinate, the leading provider of cloud-based enterprise software for the hospitality industry has raised $14.5 million in Series A financing from leading venture capital firms Benchmark Capital and Formation 8. The funding will be used to accelerate Revinate’s international expansion and for product development. Revinate, which recently celebrated its third anniversary, has well over 10,000 hotel and restaurant customers worldwide using its software platform to manage online reputation and connect with guests in today’s rapidly changing social media landscape. Revinate’s customers include the world’s top brands, management companies and ownership groups, such as Wyndham Hotel Group, Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group, Hyatt, White Lodging Services Corp. and Kimpton Hotels and Restaurants.

Jay Ashton, Revinate’s co-founder and CEO says, “We’re extremely excited to have Benchmark’s Peter Fenton and Formation 8’s Joe Lonsdale joining our board to help accelerate our growth to become the worldwide industry leader. Peter has an incredible track record guiding the success of great companies such as Twitter and Yelp, amongst many others. Joe, as co-founder of Palantir and Addepar, brings highly relevant technology vision and operating experience in big data analytics. In addition, Rich Barton, active Benchmark venture partner, founder of Expedia, and chairman of Zillow and glassdoor will also invest, advise Revinate and help drive strategy and growth. We’re fortunate to have assembled the ultimate team to help Revinate capitalize on our significant opportunity to help global hospitality companies thrive in today’s rapidly changing market.”

Peter Fenton, General Partner of Benchmark, says, “Jay Ashton and Marc Heyneker are terrific entrepreneurs seizing the opportunity of cloud and social to bring unique insights to the hospitality industry, which thrives on customer engagement and word of mouth. My partners and I have witnessed first-hand - through our involvement with Twitter, Instagram, Yelp and Facebook - the power of social channels to directly connect brands and consumers. I look forward to building upon Revinate's success as they continue to expand and scale."

Joe Lonsdale, General Partner of newly formed Formation 8, says, “We’re thrilled with Revinate’s success to date and the world-class team and culture they have built. We see huge potential for additional products and services that deliver even more value to customers, and, with our firm’s strong ties in Asia, we’re in a great position to help Revinate with global expansion.”

News of the funding comes of the heels of other major milestones at Revinate. In February, Wyndham Hotel Group, the world’s largest hospitality company, selected Revinate for all of its properties and corporate staff worldwide. Revinate has also opened its first office outside the United States, in Hong Kong, and will soon move to new corporate headquarters in the Letterman Digital Arts complex in the Presidio of San Francisco.

About Revinate:

With user generated content and reviews increasing in both number and importance, hotel and restaurant owners and operators have a simple choice: either ignore the cacophony of social media and hope for the best or proactively track and manage what is being said online in a way that deepens customer relationships, strengthens brands and boosts revenue. If you opt for the latter, then Revinate’s user-friendly software platform, custom-designed for the unique needs of the hospitality industry, is an irreplaceable tool. Revinate’s powerful technology monitors all of the important social media venues – including Twitter, Facebook and TripAdvisor – and provides instant alerts whenever your property or brand is mentioned. With information comes power: in this case, the power to please a disgruntled customer, monitor the competition and set yourself apart when it comes to guest satisfaction and loyalty. Based in San Francisco, Revinate counts the world’s leading hospitality brands as clients. To learn more, please visit http://www.revinate.com.