The Revinate Blog

Revinate Success Story: Holiday Inn St Louis

 

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.

At the end of 2011, we did a deep dive into our data to see how our customers were performing across numerous metrics. We looked for standouts among our hotel clients, and to no one’s surprise we found many. One in particular is the Holiday Inn St Louis. This small, 119-room property was outperforming all other Revinate customers in terms of online review response rate as well as response time. I looked at the property’s usage report and found that the sales manager, Lauren Barry, was their most active user so I reached out to see if she would be interested in sharing her story.

Lauren works for Lodging Hospitality Management, a small management group located in the Midwest. Lauren credits a lot of her success to the fact that her employer is always willing to look into new technologies and provide the tools she needs to be successful.  One of her most critical tools is Revinate.

Prior to Revinate, Lauren was manually searching for her reviews and mentions across the Web using Google searches and TripAdvisor alerts. Now, she simply waits for her morning email from Revinate, which alerts her to any new reviews, comments, or photos and videos that tag the hotel.

She pays particular attention to the reviews because she knows how heavily customers rely on them prior to making their booking decisions. When reviews surface issues at the property, she brings them to the morning stand-up meeting and discusses the situation with the staff. They brainstorm what they could’ve done differently and how to avoid similar situations in the future.

Lauren will also immediately respond to all reviews where a public response is allowed. In fact, she responded to 100% of her reviews in 2011. She uses that communication to thank the guest for staying with them and ensuring that they know that their business is important to the hotel.  On a mission to be the ‘friendliest hotel in St Louis,’ Lauren knows that prospective guests will see the personalized responses and know that the staff truly cares about the guests’ experiences. She often hears from guests that they decided to stay at the hotel because of her review responses.

The Holiday Inn team is also highly focused on TripAdvisor’s Popularity Index. Lauren’s favorite part of the morning is seeing whether the hotel moved up in rank. Since signing up for Revinate service, the hotel has seen its rank go up twenty spots. The team is motivated watching their progress and during their morning meetings they report on ‘TripAdvisor Timmy’s’ progress, which becomes a rallying cry for the whole staff.

Lauren also uses data in Revinate to get information on competitive hotels. By reading their reviews and accessing their sentiment scores, she can quickly spot the strengths and weaknesses of all the hotels in her comp set, which is important in sales negotiations.

Lauren and I spoke during the first big snow storm of the year and she was busy calling her local accounts to see if they needed ‘snow rooms’ for any stranded employees. I imagine these guests are now sitting down to write their reviews about how this little friendly hotel saved them from a treacherous drive and made them feel at home in their own town.

Revinate Success Story: Mexico Grand 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.

Mexico Grand Hotels represents two resorts, Hacienda Encantada Resort & Spa and Marina Fiesta Resort & Spa. As the name implies, Hacienda Encantada Resort & Spa is a contemporary, Hacienda-style, all-inclusive luxury resort located on the tourist corridor in Cabo San Lucas. Marina Fiesta Resort & Spa provides the best location at a great value. It is well known for its all-inclusive dine out concept, offering a la carte, all-inclusive dining at restaurants and bars outside the Resort.

Recognizing the influence that online reputation has on a guest’s booking decision, Mexico Grand Hotels has always devoted time and resources to monitoring online reviews. When Revinate reached out to Mexico Grand Hotels in August, 2011, the hotels were eager to learn more. They were struggling to  manually search the Web for mentions of their properties, and while they weren’t yet familiar with Revinate, they knew there must be a better way to find out what guests were saying about them online.

Gabriel Ibarra, Marketing Director, recalls, “We were having a really hard time finding all of our reviews across all the diferent booking channels and review sites. The process was incredibly time consuming and inefficient. When I saw Revinate for the first time, I was thrilled. Finally, I had found a simple platform that would aggregate all our online reviews into an easy-to-use dashboard.”

In addition to the comprehensive aggregation of online guest sreviews, Revinate also provides hotel staff with reports on their competition and detailed analysis of reviews that have proven to be incredibly important. Ibarra says, “Cabo San Lucas is a very competitive market and it’s important for us to know how we’re performing against our goals and our competitors, based on key metrics such as review frequency, review ratings and on TripAdvisor’s Popularity Index. I was blown away by the reporting functionality in Revinate.” 

Mexico Grand Hotels also understands the intrinsic value of using reviews to improve operations and guest satisfaction. Ibarra notes, “Now, with Revinate, we can focus our time on value-add tasks such as tweaking services and ammenities to improve guest satisfaction. Because we no longer spend so much time tracking down reviews, we can refocus our time on training and engaging with guests, which will mean a better hotel experience for our guests and more bookings in the future.”

Ibarra has been pleased with the success of his hotels since they began using Revinate. He notes, “The last six months with Revinate have been great. In addition to seeing our average ratings improve, the entire staff has been more conscious of the importance of treating our guests well and comunicating well with them because we can see the benefits of great service when we log into Revinate each day.”

About Revinate
Revinate helps hotels compete with a user-friendly software solution for managing and tracking reviews and media mentions on OTAs and social networks. Developed exclusively for the hospitality industry, Revinate allows hotels to turn online guest feedback into actionable plans to quickly respond to competition and market demands, increase customer satisfaction and drive revenue. Revinate is based in San Francisco and has clients worldwide. To learn more, visit www.revinate.com.

Revinate Success Story: Taj Campton Place

 

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.

Taj (luxury full-service hotels, resorts and palaces) is the flagship brand for Taj Hotels Resorts and Palaces.  Spanning world-renowned landmarks, modern business hotels, idyllic beach resorts, authentic Rajput palaces and rustic safari lodges, each Taj hotel reinterprets the tradition of hospitality in a refreshingly modern way to create unique experiences and lifelong memories. And when it comes to monitoring online feedback from guests, multiple Taj properties in the United States use Revinate.

Taj Campton Place, located in San Francisco, California, has been using Revinate for close to a year. After a 30-day trial, Anisha Yadav, Revenue Manager, was part of the team that made the recommendation to the corporate office in India to switch from another software solution to Revinate. Since switching to Revinate, Taj Campton Place has seen its TripAdvisor Popularity Index score go from 40 to 16, indicating that when a hotel begins to actively monitor its online reputation, use the feedback to improve operations and guest satisfaction and focus on measurable results, guests take notice and share their delight publicly.

The General Manager, Ashrafi Matcheswala, uses Revinate daily to read and respond to online reviews, which is proving to be a successful practice. The sales and front desk teams routinely hear that guests choose to book at the hotel because of Ashrafi’s dedication to listening and engaging with guests on online review sites, whether their reviews are positive or negative. This year, Taj Campton Place has also begun engaging with guests and prospects on Twitter, via Revinate’s TweetConcierge, and other social platforms.

In addition to allowing staff to easily engage with guests, Revinate has provided Taj Campton Place with tools to effectively track success around guest satisfaction. Anisha says, “Revinate GS2 reports allow us to operationalize guest feedback in a way we, as hoteliers, are used to. Similar to the STR report, we can now see how we’re doing against previous performance, or our competitive set, every week and every month. It’s the perfect way for us to track performance.”

Tracking against the competition is something that Taj Campton Place takes very seriously. Prior to Revinate, the staff didn’t have a good idea what their competitors’ guests liked and didn’t like about the hotels. Anisha says, “Now, with Revinate, it’s easy for us to see and understand our competitive strengths and challenges. Sentiment analysis in Revinate makes is really easy to see how we compare in a qualitative way. This data is incredibly valuable to our sales team,” she adds.

More than a software platform, Revinate has proven to be a partner and ally. Anisha notes that her account manager routinely reaches out to share information about new features and provide free training to help the staff make the most of Revinate. She says, “I feel like Revinate is committed to our success. It’s rare to get a call from a software company that wants to spend time reviewing your account with you to provide insights into the data and suggestions for improving your rankings. But it’s a pleasure doing business with companies like that.”

Revinate Success Story: Holiday Inn Club Vacations

 

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.

Holiday Inn Club Vacations® is a growing network of seven branded vacation resorts, with an additional location in Las Vegas set to join the brand in 2012. Holiday Inn Club Vacations began using Revinate at their flagship property, Orange Lake Resort, the largest resort in the network with 2,478 villas. In 2012, the brand plans to expand its use of Revinate to all seven resorts.

Long-time believers in online reputation management, Holiday Inn Club Vacations was an early adopter of Radian6 to monitor brand mentions and Hootsuite to engage across social media. However, given the growing importance of online hotel reviews and the very specialized requirements of reputation management for hotels, Holiday Inn Club Vacations sought out a comprehensive monitoring and engagement platform that is exclusively focused on hospitality. Revinate was selected, in no small part because ease-of-use is critically important to wide team adoption. The team was pleased to find that Revinate was much more than an online review site “listening platform”. Brooke Doucha, Senior Manager, Corporate Communcations, says, “Not only does Revinate aggregate user-submitted reviews from all the top review sites, it has greatly enhanced our ability to report on our property’s performance.”

According to Keith Strickland, Social Media Specialist at Holiday Inn Club Vacations at Orange Lake Resort, “Revinate seamlessly integrates and organizes all reviews for our property into a secure, easily-accessible and cloud-based dashboard that can be utilized by an unlimited number of users, including not only myself but the Manager of Rental Marketing, Front Desk Director and others. Revinate also allows us to hone in on our performance trends as compared to our competition, and its new “sentiment analysis” provides key trends and topics so that we can better understand our social audience.”

In late 2011, when Revinate rolled out foursquare integration, Holiday Inn Club Vacations was eager to take advantage of the new functionality. Keith says, “Integration with foursquare, the leader in location-based services, is really interesting to us. By monitoring social media activity in real-time while people are onsite, we can personally recognize our guests, offer deals to drive ancillary revenue and provide enhanced levels of customer service.”

Enhancing levels of customer service is one of the cornerstones of the brand’s social media engagement program. When it comes to service, Keith notes, “We’ve pleasantly surprised many guests who check-in via foursquare. Little do they know we’re monitoring foursquare check-ins and all mentions of our brand name. We can quickly reply to the guest, usually via Twitter, with a note along the lines of “Welcome to Holiday Inn Club Vacations. We see you’re having a great time at [insert venue]. Be sure to try [insert recommendation] and let us know if there’s anything you need.” The delight experienced by our guests often leads them to recommend us to their social networks of family and friends. One guest even commented, “OMG!! The resort I’m staying at just mentioned me.” 

The resort is currently working with its Food and Beverage department to serve up special offers. The marketing and communications team is actively engaging with customers to better understand what specials foursquare users will gravitate towards, and how to best structure specials to ensure business success. While foursquare provides insightful venue statistics, including average check-ins per day, unique visitors, social reach as well as age and gender demographics, Orange Lake Resort is most excited about the quality metrics that Revinate provides, including the tips that customers leave when they’re on site.

Although the resort originally signed up with Revinate to simply understand what guests were saying about the property in online reviews, Brooke says that staff is now using Revinate far more actively and for far more than ever anticipated. She says, “In addition to saving us an incredible amount of time monitoring and analyzing our review data, Revinate has significantly impacted our reporting capabilities, allowing us to easily operationalize social media and report on our success. We’ve been so impressed with Revinate’s rapid innovation that I can’t wait to see what 2012 will bring.”

About Revinate
Revinate helps hotels compete with a user-friendly software solution for managing and tracking reviews and media mentions on OTAs and social networks. Developed exclusively for the hospitality industry, Revinate allows hotels to turn online guest feedback into actionable plans to quickly respond to competition and market demands, increase customer satisfaction and drive revenue. Revinate is based in San Francisco and has clients worldwide. To learn more, visit www.revinate.com.

 

Revinate Success Story: Paradise Point Resort & Spa

 

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.

In August, 2010, Destination Hotels and Resorts took over the management of Paradise Point Resort & Spa in San Diego. At the time, the resort’s TripAdvisor Popularity Index was at 121, (out of 249 hotels) smack dab in the middle of its market and at the bottom of page four on TripAdvisor for San Diego hotels. Less than a year later, the hotel has gained 59 points and is ranked 62. Paradise Point Resort & Spa can now be found on page two of TripAdvisor’s San Diego listings and it continues to see gains.

Dana Flower is the Marketing Manager responsible for social media at the property. She attributes the hotel’s recent success on TripAdvisor to a hotel-wide effort to increase its ranking by focusing on creating an excellent guest experience, which in turn drives great reviews. Revinate plays a large role in tracking its success and enabling staff to act immediately to improve operations and engage with customers. Dana says, “The bottom line is that if you provide a spectacular service and guest experience, the rest will follow naturally.  We’ve rallied our entire staff behind this effort by sharing great reviews via email and in staff meetings, announcing any and all changes in ranking, and setting monthly and yearly goals for our ranking, number of reviews, and ratings, which is really easy using Revinate. These activities create an atmosphere of excitement and importance, and keep the staff motivated to provide great service because they can see how their actions and quality of work are directly connected to our public reputation.”

When it comes to encouraging reviews, the property reaches out to guests both on and off property. The hotel staff is armed with personalized versions of the TripAdvisor card and when they come across guests who are clearly experiencing a great stay, they engage and encourage the guests to write reviews. In addition, when Dana receives a comment card that has high scores, she replies, thanks the guest and provides a link to share the feedback publicly on TripAdvisor. While the activity may be time consuming, Dana says, ”It’s definitely worth it in the end as many of the folks that I reach out to do post reviews.”  

Dana also uses Revinate to monitor social media and the Web in general to find happy guests. She says, “If a guest posts great things about the property on Facebook, Twitter, or our blog, I privately contact him to thank him for the comments and provide a link so he can share his experiences on TripAdvisor.”

Dana believes that the property’s investment in its online reputation is paying off in many ways. In addition to providing a higher level of service on-property, she says, “I believe the money we invest in TripAdvisor Business Listings and “Check Rates” features is going much further due to our improved ranking and quality of reviews.”  

Revinate Success Story: Greystone 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.

Greystone Hotels is a well-established West Coast hotel owner and hospitality management company based in San Francisco, with an eclectic range of properties in California and Oregon. An early adopter in using online reviews as a barometer of guest satisfaction, Greystone Hotels has been paying attention to public guest feedback since the first hotel review sites launched.

In July, 2010, Emily Johnson, Manager of E-commerce and Marketing at Greystone Hotels, saw Revinate for the first time and it was love at first sight. Emily recalls, “My first thought was that Revinate was the answer to my problems. For nearly three years prior, I spent at least two days a month manually assembling monthly online review reports for all nine hotels, in addition to daily monitoring and responding to reviews. It was so important, but also an incredibly time-consuming and arduous process.” Two weeks after seeing the product for the first time, Greystone Hotels was up and running.

Revinate Success Story: Delta Hotels and Resorts

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 many brands and hospitality companies, rolling out new technology across multiple properties can be a daunting project. But when Canada-based hotel chain Delta Hotels and Resorts made the decision to get serious about its online reputation, Revinate assured the team that implementation would be quick and painless. And now, less than a month after roll-out to 46 properties, Delta is singing Revinate’s praises.

Delta began looking for an online reputation management solution at the end of 2010 with the growing impact of TripAdvisor and other online channels on bookings. The corporate team began to investigate solutions that would make managing reviews and social media less time-consuming. Lisa Ballum was the marketing manager tasked with finding a solution. She says, “We looked at three or four software solutions but when I saw Revinate, I said, ‘This is it!’. It was clearly designed for hotels, which is important to us. In addition, it was easy to use, intuitive, and had all the features we needed.”

Ricardo Nicholas, Director of Brand Performance, wanted to make sure that the rollout would not impact daily operations or throw a wrench into an already busy hotelier’s day. When the sales director at Revinate assured him that he would have all the properties trained and using Revinate in a few weeks, he was skeptical. He says, “Coordinating a rollout of new technology across 46 properties can be tricky but Revinate made good on its promise of a quick and easy rollout. While we worked on the communications plan and a manual for the hotels that included brand guidelines, expectations and product instructions, Revinate scheduled multiple training sessions to accommodate about 350 employees. Since the software service is so easy to use, that’s really all it took. We were up and running about three weeks later.”
 
Just a month after roll-out, the feedback from the field has been very positive. Hotel employees report that Revinate is really easy to use and is providing them with valuable data and intelligence that they have never had access to before. Corporate users are able to track the portfolio’s progress in social media, access all reviews for all properties in a single place, and see the performance of the different properties across all key metrics.

Lisa and Ricardo are quick to add that they have been incredibly impressed with the quality of support they receive from Revinate. Lisa says, “From sales, to training, to customer support, everyone that we come across at Revinate is eager to please and delightful to work with. We are looking forward to a long and happy partnership.”

Revinate Success Story: Manchester Grand Hyatt San Diego

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.

Manchester Grand Hyatt is a 1,625-room hotel located on the water and within reach of the city’s numerous attractions, including the Gaslamp Quarter, the San Diego Zoo and Sea World. The hotel features a full-service spa, tennis courts, a 24-hour gym, an outdoor pool and hot tub and a world-class marketing department.

Machester Grand Hyatt San Diego was one of the first Hyatt properties to adopt Revinate, now a brand standard among Hyatt hotels in North America. Kristin Spitz, Electronic Sales and Marketing Manager, is credited with finding and championing Revinate at the hotel. She says, “I was spending about three hours a day visiting all the review sites and seeing what was being said about our property. When I saw how much time I could save with Revinate, I knew it was a must-have service.” Using Revinate, Kristin estimates she saves more than two and a half hours a day, giving her more time to drive sales and engage with guests.

Kristin and her team have long believed that listening and responding to reviews and mentions is the right thing to do for the business. She says, “Our business is about customer service and listening to our guests. I love that there is such an accessible channel that allows us to listen to our guests’ comments and then improve our operations based on this feedback.” And guests are clearly taking notice. One TripAdvisor review of the property, dated February 22, 2011 states, “We originally had reserved a room at a hotel next door but decided to change when we noticed the staff pays attention to the TripAdvisor reviews.”

Investing in a social media program at the hotel is also paying off. Kristin uses Social Media Searches, a feature in Revinate, to find people who are looking for hotel recommendations in San Diego. Social Media Searches monitors Twitter, public Facebook pages, blogs, forums and millions of other sources. Kristin says, “Social Media Searches is a huge improvement over Google Alerts. It’s much more comprehensive and has proven to be a great tool, allowing me to find new business for both the hotel, and the spa.”

Kristin has also found that social media can be a valuable tool for driving loyalty and customer satisfaction. She actively monitors the Twitter hash tags for the groups meeting in the hotel to identify any issues that might arise or opportunities to surprise and delight guests. She explains, “By watching the stream of tweets during meetings, I have a real-time look at how things are going. A few months ago I saw a meeting guest tweeting about trouble with the wi-fi. Within minutes, I was able to send a technician to the room to fix the issue before it became a problem. The guests were floored at how responsive and on-the-ball we were.”

 

Revinate Success Story: Hyatt Regency Chicago

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.

Hyatt Regency Chicago is a AAA Four Diamond hotel located in downtown Chicago, minutes from the Magnificent Mile. The 2019 room hotel caters to both business and leisure travelers and is a Hyatt flagship property.

Jennifer Kedinger is the social media marketing manager at the hotel. As her title suggests, Jennifer is responsible for driving sales and loyalty for the hotel and restaurants through social media. While many hotels don’t yet have employees dedicated to social media, Jennifer is starting to see more and more hotels dedicate staff to social programs, especially among Hyatt Hotels, where her success has attracted a lot of attention. 

Jennifer has found great success using Revinate’s Social Media Searches and TweetConciege to monitor for guests checking into the hotel using Foursquare or announcing their arrival on Twitter. She says, “Monitoring these sites and reaching out to guests is a great way to welcome them, fix any issues that might arise in real time and answer any questions. Guests are always really impressed that we’re listening, and since so few hotels are doing it, they’re often surprised. I often get emails, tweets and cards thanking me for such a high level of service.”

When asked to cite specific examples, Jennifer recalls an incident when a guest tweeted that he checked into the hotel but forgot his toothbrush. Before he had time to put down his phone he received a tweet from Jennifer that a toothbrush was on the way up to his room. He later commented that he had never before experienced that level of service from a hotel.

Another example involves a guest that was welcomed via Twitter when he virtually checked in. Jennifer asked if she could assist with anything during his stay and he responded flippantly that he would like large quantities of Qtips and gummy bears. Jennifer responded with directions to the nearest store but also sent up an amenity to his room, causing him to tweet that he travels a lot for work and has stayed in many hotels but this was his most unforgettable hotel stay due to the dedication of the staff.

Jennifer also uses Revinate to manage online reviews. She says, “With Revinate, it’s easy to manage the hotel’s online reputation that’s being driven by user generated online reviews. Staying on top of this input helps the Management Committee keep a good pulse on the guests experience and then share that feedback with their team of associates.” She adds, “It has proven to be a great source to help the hotel maintain the authentic hospitality that they strive for everyday.” 

 

Revinate Success Story: Waterford Hotels and Inns

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.

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.