You already mentioned Expedia and TripAdvisor, but you will also find reviews on sites such as Yahoo Travel, Hotels.com, Travelocity, and many more.

Google will not search these sites, nor will it pull content from sites such as YouTube or Flickr (video and photo posting sites).

All of these sites can be searched manually, however to be fair, at some point this becomes a very tedious process. How many times are you willing to look up your reviews on Travelocity, only to find no new information, before you stop looking and miss something that might have been important?

Our human nature makes us inclined to set aside tasks that are tedious. It is for this reason many hoteliers are seeking out various tools to help monitor this content for them, such as Review Analyst (www.reviewanalyst.com). This changes what would have been a regular “surfing safari” into a 3-5 minute task. And just in case you forget, we’ll send a weekly summary of everything that has happened with your hotel.

Regardless of your approach, one thing is for certain – consumers are no longer accepting the word of sales and marketing professionals as fact, and are seeking confirmation from other consumers. This is not going away, and will only get bigger, so it is important to have a plan in place to use this to your advantage.

Dean Schmit
Product Manager
reviewanalyst.com

Consumer response is valuable to both existing and future customers as a tool to accurately determine the truth about a property through the eyes of past travellers, and also to accommodation providers as a means to evaluate the services they provide – and for some improve, and others reinforce the good services they provide.

Ezibed.com sends all reviews direct to the manager/owner on a monthly basis and the owner/manager has the opportunity to respond if they wish. This response is then put onto the website to give customers balanced reviews. We send this feedback direct to the manager/owner rather the reservations team so that this information gets to the decision maker.

The reason Ezibed.com added ratings and reviews stemmed from customer feedback. They wanted it, so they got it.

As you know, customers want transperency and certainty when booking online. Customer feedback allows for this as the customer now doesn’t have to rely on what the accommodation provider thinks of themselves, but what their customers actually think of them. In some cases their is a large gap between the two.

Customers ratings and reviews are here to stay. The accommodation providers that embrace this feedback and make changes to their buinesses based on the information provided by their customers will be the businesses that succeed. The ones that ignore it will not.

Gareth Pearce
Managing Director
Ezibed.com