Guest review management is becoming more and more important than advertising or direct marketing.
|
Category: Hotel Reviews
What Benefits for Small Hotels, Inns or B&B’s offer Tripadvisor Guest Reviews?
The sheer numbers
I’ve not paid a lot attention to my own hotel’s guest reviews until recently.
First of all not many guests write in the good old paper guest book. Maybe 1 out of 10 to 1 out of 8 is my guess. Less guests are inclined to put their findings on an internet site. So by nature the small hotel / B&B has a disadvantage.
Would lovers of small hotels and B&B’s turn to large sites for reviews?
Although I am not hesitant to chalk my findings in a blog, I do not often file guest reviews on sites like Tripadvisor, Booking or similar sites. I do understand that many people are naturally reluctant to become personal on the world wide web. So although Tripadvisor has collected many reviews over the years, such reviews are far from complete. Especially for the small hotels and B&B’s who fail to get many reviews by the low number of their guests.
It is my feeling that even if you are inclined to look up guest reviews, the frequent visitors and fans of small hotels and B&B’s are not so likely to use Tripadvisor, as they know the small hotels and B&B’s are not easily findable on mega sites like Tripadvisor.
The possible abuse by hotels
Although Strictly Forbidden, it is clear from various comments over the internet that Tripadvisor reviews are from time to time manipulated by hotels or parties closely relating to hotels. Recently it has become public knowledge that Tripadvisor sometimes puts red flags by reviews that appear too advantageous or disadvantageous to be true.
The Asociated Press had an article on Tripadvisor putting warning signs at guest reviews.
Tripadvisor monitoring of reviews
It does seem that Tripadvisor monitors reviews before they are published. As per my recent attention I had asked a couple of guests if they would like to write a tripadvisor review about my hotel. They did so, but several reported back that apparently they couldn’t get their reviews published despite reclamations to the Tripadvisor helpdesk. Thanks to the kind help via their twitteraccount they were able to dig the reviews up from their servers’ vaults. It turns out that there is a time lag between someone filing a review and Tripadvisor publishing it.
The ownership and alliances of Tripadvisor
Expedia owns Tripadvisor and Tripadvisor collaborates with a number of OTA’s. That’s one of the reasons reviews at Tripadvisor pull people away from your small hotel site and induces them to book your small hotel via one of the OTA’s. But then you face another problem as small hotel/B&B: If you do not have a central repository with your room inventory from which the OTA’s can book you, you’ll be at loss. OTA’s want numbers as well. They induce you to give them as much of your inventory as possible, or refuse you. If you give them each your total availability without a central inventory of available rooms you will find yourself busy the whole day disc jockeying several OTA sites to open and close room availability. An other solution is you minimize the number of rooms you put available to one or another OTA, but then you are not advertising yourself, as most OTA’s don’t show your accommodation if there is no availability. It doesn’t seem to help if you are in the Tripadvisor B&B section, because there are hardly accommodations there. Maybe their experience in the new field of vacation rentals (appartments and villas) will help to cure the problems the small hotel owners are facing.
Mixed Feelings
From the above it follows that I have mixed feelings about Tripadvisor, even if every marketing guru will loudly claim that you have to have guest reviews. In principle it can help to make a small hotel findable. However it also can make a small hotel feel extremely small viz a viz the large chains of hotels.
An afterthought
Oh yes and when the lost reviews were up finally, we rose from position 14 to position 3 in The Hague. That triggers another observation: The Tripadvisor algorithm sees to it that older reviews are less influential than the newer ones. That works to both sides: A new highly acclaimed accommodation can get number one position with just one glorious review. I have had the honor myself in the past. The longer Tripadvisor publishes reviews of your establishment, the heavier your glorious past becomes:-)
You may have seen this post change over time…That is because it happened again: I pressed the publish button too early (-:
Review: Grasse – Bastide Saint Mathieu – A Real Gem!
Bastide Saint Mathieu: Entrance
I’ve preluded to this review a long time ago in French Riviera and The Art of Booking Online: Nothing Zen! Part 3. I didn’t publish this review earlier, because I had terrible problems organizing my photos last year. That problem I only solved recently.
Front
In July 2007 we were probably among the last guests of the Dutch couple who had started Bastide Saint Mathieu:
View from our James Gordon Bennet Suite
A French Bastide recently restored with meticulous care, surrounded by 2 hectares of its own gardens and parkland. It Sleeps 14/17 in beautiful large bedrooms, with marble ensuite bathrooms. Fine terracing and gas flare lit cuisine d’ete for outside parties and entertaining. Huge swimming pool, boules piste. Great views; splendour and privacy in the triangle between Mougins, Grasse and Valbonne; 15 minutes Cannes, 25 minutes Nice.
our beautifully appointed sitting room
It is a villa with 2 suites and 4 rooms, 1 of which is a single room.
Our Bathroom
All rooms are individually and elegantly decorated with period pieces, open log fires, air conditioning and all of today’s facilities. The property is also available fully staffed on an exclusive basis with catering arrangements made available to suit the individual wishes of guests. In a corner of the typical Provencal garden is a lovely pool and sun deck overlooking the olive groves and hills of Mougins. There guests can spend some lazy hours soaking up the sun rays and enjoying the fragrances of lavender, flowers and herbs bordering the area. It is surrounded by various old villages and a vast choice of restaurants and golf courses,
View from the outside breakfast area over the garden
Bastide Saint Mathieu offers a truly unique ambiance of luxury, charm and tranquility.
The former Dutch owners had sold to the present British owners who would start operating it August 2007. That was another reason for publishing this not immediately. It is my view that a lot of the fun of a staying in a hotel is made out by the way the owners/staff receive you. I am glad I could find two recent positive reviews in the meantime.
The Pool
We stayed two nights in the James Gordon Bennet Suite, which has a separate sitting room and bedroom and we were pampered well by the former owner Inge.
La cuisine d’été
Since our stay they have added a pergola to the swimming pool and made a covered area on the terrace for Al Fresco breakfasts, lunches and dinners. They have a marvelous photo gallery on their site.
I wouldn’t mind going back.
Post Alia: Still Nothing Zen!
While doing online research for this post, I found out that sites like Tripadvisor really are putting the smaller hotels like Bastide Saint Mathieu to a disadvantage vis a vis the big chains: Usually not many guests do write in a hotel’s guest book, I would estimate one out of 4 guests. If they write in the hotel’s guest book, they are not likely to write an online review. So my estimate is that less than one out of twenty guests writes an online review. Then the big question is where the review is written online, as there are many possibilities….
So Bastide Saint Mathieu has only 3 reviews on the US Site of Tripadvisor and the same three on Tripadvisor’s UK site. However when I looked at their UK an French sites three weeks ago, the UK site couldn’t find Bastide Saint Mathieu and the French site had 7 reviews….I see now the same 3 reviews. Probably they have now acknowledged he change of ownership…
It used to be a member of Chateaux et Hotels. I’m not sure it is now. Ah, darn, they still are! I wasn’t sure, because Chateaux et Hotels deemed it feasible to change their site. If you now are searching a hotel on their site you only can search for available hotel rooms. If the hotel is fully booked, you can’t find the hotel on the very site of their own marketing organization. This is Mighty Stupid! Chateaux et Hotels took away their maps……Why make it easy (as they did in an earlier version of their site) when you can make it difficult?
Motel One: Wrong Name for German’s Ultimate Designer Pod Hotels?
Recently, on recommendation of a friend, we stayed three nights in the Motel One Munich City Ost. It is important to mention the “City Ost” part in its name, as currently Munich has three and soon will have four Motel Ones. Currently, in Germany there are already 21 Motel Ones and they are expanding rapidly.
Why do I believe it is the Ultimate Pod Hotel?
Recently I reviewed the CitizenM Amsterdam Schiphol, the first of a chain te be rolled out, and I was really impressed by its philosophy and its design.
However, Motel One has four plus points when compared to CitizenM:
- Its double beds are old fashion placed and accessible on three sides. Not via one side.
- You can shower and use the toilet in a separate very cleverly designed small bathroom
- Has its own car parking in the cellar
- Has windows you can open
Motel One Locations
Are preferably inner-city locations or in peripheral areas of cities and then, with convenient access and visually prominent locations, next to motorways and surrounded by arterial routes and/or in busy locations such as commercial, industrial or mixed-use areas.
Motel One’s Lounge
Has designer chairs and a wide screen with a fake fish aquarium program that I hate and have seen in other places as well. At the back of the chairs you see one of the structural columns that have brick or stone strips as wall covering. They have a function as separation of several compartments of the ground floor. They give the whole a bit homey feeling.
Has a triple function as reception, bar and breakfast room, while the breakfast buffet is cleverly hidden when not in use by a folding separation. The people at our place were very friendly and check in is very simple: It is done by real life people and not by computer screens with the usually necessary assistance from people. Check out is very easy: At Motel One you are required to prepay for your whole stay, so at check out you don’t have to do anything else than return your key card. There are no mini bars and you are required to pay cash or by card when you order something from the bar which is open at least till one AM, but I presume you can get something during the whole night as the reception is staffed 24/7.
Here you see the seating area for the breakfast part of the lounge with the folding separation that covers the breakfast buffet area.
Granted The CitizenM lounge is flashier, but this lounge is also okay.
Motel One rooms
Are small, no question about that. Hence I’m coining it a Designer Pod hotel rather than a Motel.
But as you can see they are cleverly dimensioned. You can move around. At your left side you see a small sort of cupboard where you can hang some clothes.
The bed, accessible from three sides, with clever easy to clean headboard and no footboard (I’m 6″4). good reading lights.
Photo taken in the direction of the bathroom and entrance. Here you see part of the open cupboard with places for stuff.
Motel One Bathroom
I have yet to find a pod hotel bathroom that has this good lay out and design. There is no bath, but a shower stall that measures 80 by 160 cm. I really like the huge horizontally placed white tiles. The floor of the shower stall is a simple Bette polyester showerfloor. Easy to clean and not slippery at all. It matches fine with the black tiles of the floor and the under side of the sink. You can easily reach for your towel from the shower. Waste basket under the sink where you anticipate it to be. The glass separation is partly glued to the side of the table holding the Philippe Starck designed sink. That gives it great strength. In addition the accessibility is good, even if you are a big fellow like me, and you don’t have to wrestle with a shower curtain while the Bette shower floor sees to it that the floor between the toilet and the sink is not inundated when you take a shower. This is an example of how a small bathroom can be. I really like it!
I have a few minor points of critique:
- If everybody wants to have breakfast at the same time the space is too cramped.
- The two coffee machines of the breakfast buffets give a unnecessarily bad quality coffee. I believe it is the quality of the coffee or the fine tuning of the machines. That’s not clever, because everybody for breakfast now orders a coffee at the bar from the fine Italian espresso machine. Hence you get lines…In addition they are understaffed when they have to make time consuming cappuccinos and have to serve guests with questions, for checking out or for checking in….
- No soap holders in the shower stalls???
- You don’t have to pay for WiFi in the lounge, but you have to pay for WiFi in your room.
About Motel One
Motel One
is operated by Motel One Management GMBH, which is 65 % owned by One Hotels and Resorts AG. 35% of Motel One Management GMBH is held by a Dutch BV, MSRESS Motel One Holding B.V., a holding company for Morgan Stanley Real Estate’s Special Situations Fund III that funded Motel One in 2007.
Company history:
1987 Astron Holding GmbH founded as a private limited company.
1993 Astron Holding GmbH converted into a PLC and renamed ASTRON Hotels & Resorts AG
1999 Motel One GmbH formed as a 100% subsidiary of ASTRON Hotels & Resorts AG
2002 ASTRON Hotels GmbH, a 100% subsidiary of ASTRON Hotels & Resorts AG, with 51 Hotels and over 8000 rooms sold to NH Hoteles, Spain
2005 Legal form and name of ASTRON Hotels & Resorts AG changed, creating Motel One AG which after the infusion of capital by Morgan Stanley is now known as One Hotels and Resorts AG, which has a couple of hotels left form the sale of its former portfolio to NH Hoteles.
Total number of hotels: 21 Motel Ones in Germany (see : Motel One Site)
Total number of rooms: 3,000.
6 Hotels under construction: München-Sendlinger Tor – 241 rooms opening in 2009; Leipzig – 189 rooms; Hamburg-Airport – 252 rooms; Berlin Urania – 411 rooms; Berlin Bellevue – 248 rooms; München-City – 463 rooms, which will bring the total number of rooms to slightly under 5,000 rooms.
Category – 2 star (rating issued by the German Hotel and Restaurant Association DEHOGA)
Room sizes – Clear room dimensions: 2,72 m × 5,80 m – Room dimensions between axes: 2,90 m × 6,21 m – Net Area per room: 13,28 qm – Gross area per room: 22 – 24 qm
Room prices: from € 49
Last updated 08/2008
Source: Motel One
Verdict
When I see “Motel” I have an association with seedy worn out US (or Dutch or German) side of the road accommodations too greasy to enter. Therefor I believe the name is ill chosen. I believe it is a pod hotel by the size and conciseness of its rooms, the 3 in 1 lounge, but from the pod hotels I have seen or been in, it is the most complete one.
If you want a bed to crash in, do go with rates from Euro 49 to Euro 89. I am already prebooking a room in a Berlin Motel One for the 2009 ITB Berlin Blogers meet up.
High Syndicate: Great Help for Hoteliers such as Jumeirah
Just by coincidence I noticed someone landing here via Jumeira Knowledge base
I already knew a lot is going on at High Syndicate, sister of WiWiH: Many Hoteliers use it as as a closed group repository. I assumed access only for the insiders of the big hotel chain in question and I had never imagined the wealth of knowledge available for the hotelier and how easy it is to navigate:
On the landing page you get :
-
the 5 last
- Tripadvisor Reviews of your hotel Portfolio, so you don’t have to click through The Tripadvisor site
- Items of Industry News, and I know High Syndicate has a good portfolio of industry news
- Posts of Travel Bloggers who syndicate their content with WiWiH
- Google enabled search function dedicated for the knowledge base of the hotel chain in question
and a
Then you have separate tabs for:
- “Tripadvisor” with a great submenu per property
- “In the media”, i.e. what others write about your hotels
- “News” i.e. Travel and Hospitality Industry News from the High Syndicate news portfolio
- “Blogs” for Travel and Hospitality blog content
- “Documents”, mainly Travel and Hospitality Industry studies, like HitWise reports for travel sites
- “Events” related to Travel and Hospitality that are upcoming
Knowing the two sites High Syndicate and WiWiH, I knew about all those functions and possibilities, but I had never seen them grouped together in such clever and easily navigable way.
It is not a loud screaming design.
I wonder how the hoteliers would do themselves, if they would apply the same simple principles for their own websites instead of those bleary screens with pop ups and a lot of clutter.
Guest Reviews do not only tell you something about the hotel, but also about the reviewer:
Apart from all, I was very interested to be able to quickly flip through their Tripadvisor guest reviews, because Jumeirah is the operator of the famous Dubai flagship hotel (7* they claim) Burj Al Arab. They get good reviews but amazingly also some very negative reviews and some that say more about the guest than about the Hotel. For Example:
- BAD
i thought that one’s stay at the burj al arab would be rather splendid and i was extremely foolish to think so. as i arrived at the airport on first class from emirates we were taken by helicopter to the hotel. My gucci gown was ruined on the arrival and the sun was to bright so i had to close one’s eyes for much time when we arrived we were handed oil in our hands that wouldn’t come off for a while and our butler got in the way. the room was poor and the building and rooms bog standard. One would never go there again and would compare it to the dorchester hotel in london which is utterly ridiculous.never shall i set foot here again.
.
Seems like a bogus report to me. The reviewer has no other reviews
- Awsome, but dissappointing
I’ll start by saying the room and building itself are just an awesome site – don’t get me wrong. And just to say that I’ve stayed at the Burj Al Arab will be something that I really don’t ever anticipate knowing anyone else will be able to match in my group of friends. However, I was disappointed by some of the service provided. For the money paid – I was expecting to be wowed! The check-in was a bit of a cluster and the check-out was as well. In fact, the entire stay went to h#$% once we recieved our checkout bill. They have no real organized way to control the madness down at the entrance and they are trying to get people onto shuttles/taxi’s/incoming passengers/etc and you are in the middle of the maddness. The fitness center was lacking as well for such a nice place! It was nothing better than a hilton fitness center. All in all we don’t regret staying there – but we will never do it again – merely for the price.
An Hilton Aficionado who wanted to buy bragging rights, but found out he paid dearly. Which makes me think that this is an example of the Long Tail effect of a really loyal guest. If they stay somewhere else they will thumb it down!
- An outcry about Al Qasr at Madinat Jumeirah Dubai:
My husband and I arrived at Al Qasr on 7th June and were to check-out and depart on 9 June from Al Qasr at Madinat Jumeirah, Dubai on an Emirates flight to Paris scheduled for 08:20hrs. In order to save time in the early morning before our scheduled departure from the hotel, we completed check-out formalities and settled our hotel bill just before midnight on 8 June 2008. We also requested a wake-up call at 05:00am the following morning as we had an Emirates limousine scheduled to pick us up from Al Qasr at 06:00am for our 08:20am flight (as we had already completed the online check-in procedure, we were required to arrive at the airport 90 mins before departure).
We promptly received our wake-up call from the hotel staff at 05:00am as requested and waited patiently in our room till 06:15am for a call from the hotel staff to announce the arrival of our pick-up and finally called Emirates to find out why the car had not yet arrived. We waited another 5 mins on the phone till the Emirates representative made inquiries about our scheduled pick-up and came back on the line to inform us that the limousine had in fact arrived at the hotel as scheduled at 06:00am and that the driver had also requested the concierge on duty to inform us of the arrival of our Emirates pick-up. Unfortunately, the concierge a gentleman by the name of Mr. Rauf refused to inform us about the arrival of the car and told the driver that he was not allowed to disturb his guests at that hour and therefore sent the driver away! The driver left the premises and reported the incident to Emirates airline, making sure to mention the name of Mr. Rauf for the record.
We immediately called Service One from our room to inform them of the incident and asked for Mr. Rauf to ask him why he had done such a ridiculous thing! As we were already late for our flight, I told Mr. Rauf to meet me downstairs. Upon meeting Mr. Rauf at the entrance of the hotel and demanding an explanation for his actions, we were treated with complete indifference and not even given an apology! We also asked how he could do such a thing when we had asked for a wake-up call from the hotel at 05:00am, to which he shrugged and mumbled something about not being able to trace the wake-up call. To make things worse, he did not even have the courtesy to arrange for a complementary airport transfer for us considering it was clearly his fault that the limousine had left without us. He asked the doorman to get us a taxi for the airport for which we ended up paying Dhs 95 upon reaching the airport.
Needless to say, the experience has been shocking and pathetic coming from a hotel of it’s repute and will prevent us from ever returning at any of the Jumeirah properties. The unprofessional behavior of Mr. Rauf indicates a serious deficiency in the training of the hotel personnel and even a lack of common-sense amongst it’s employees. I believe that if a prestigious hotel like Al Qasr is unable to meet such basic expectations of it’s guests (that even a 3-star property would definitely see to) it is simply not worthy of it’s reputation and definitely not worth paying big buck for!
.
Poor Mr Rauf was a bit sleepy and didn’t want to disturb his guests. I have the feeling the guest in question is to blame as well. If time is of essence, I would check and double check and would certainly not wait as a lamb in my room, but at the front desk to wait for my driver. Secondly I wouldn’t waste time by telling Mr Rauf he was such a dumbass. I rather would request an immediate solution…..I believe the Hotel should politely but resolutely point that out. Probably the lady is still simply mad about her own mistakes.
Worth a closer look! I am wondering whether they will make it password protected after this post.
Update
And Yes! Soon after publication of this post, they put a relocation to Jumeirah’s main site in the High Syndicate landing page: Henri Roelings was watching me 🙂