ReviewAnalyst launches service to provide Hotels simple monitoring of Online Reviews
I was talking to my old buddy Mike Wylie, former VP of E-Commerce at Wyndham Hotels (during my Fairmont days), and now CEO of his own Internet Marketing Agency Standing Dog. Mike and I created the HSMAI Hotel Internet Marketing Committee back in 2003. Over the past two years, he has been enjoying his time on his own, and got quite creative in helping his clients. He received requests from his clients to help with monitoring of blogs and review sites, such as Tripadvisor, so he
built an application to do it.
He is calling it ReviewAnalyst. For sure, there are other services out there, like Chatter Guard at steep $175/month (compared to the $99/month that Review Analyst is charging), or Google Alerts or Technorati Watchlist - but they don’t provide the analysis behind the information. I think, it is a great service as far I can tell, but the most important point is still that the hotel should work very hard to nurture happy customers and avoid negative postings; and react immediately if a negative review comes up.
I spoke to Mike a few weeks ago. Here is an excerpt of our discussion:
TOURISM INTERNET MARKETING BLOG: What is ReviewAnalyst?
MIKE WYLIE: Review Analyst monitors consumer
generated content for hotels on hotel review sites, blogs, video sites and
image sites and brings it all into a simple dashboard where they can track and
analyze the chatter and respond where possible.
TIM: Why did you develop this
application?
MW: We understand the impact that
consumer generated hotel reviews and content can have on a hotel’s
revenue – both negative and positive. It’s something we were
actively managing for our clients and encouraging them to take notice of it and
react to it. So we built an application to make it easier to manage and
ultimately decided to roll out for any hotel.
TIM: Where does the
‘Analyst’ part come in?
MW: First we show an average rating
of the reviews over the last 30 days to show if the reviews are trending up or
down.
Second, we perform an analysis
on the reviews to find recurring keywords to determine if the hotel might have
some challenges or opportunities. For example, ‘service’ is
the top keyword for one of the hotels we monitor. After filtering it further
based on the star rating of the review, the hotel identified that service was a
reoccurring theme in its negative reviews. By clicking on the keyword in
the dashboard, they can see all of the reviews mentioning ‘services’
and get more details.
Third, since TripAdvisor allows
management responses, we provide a guideline for how to respond and examples
which sample.
TIM: What is the cost?
MW: It’s simply $99 a month
per hotel with discounts for a group of 5 or more hotels.
TIM: What are your future plans for
ReviewAnalyst?
MW: We will continue to refine it
and the algorithms in place. And competitor tracking will be added over
the next 2 weeks. Additionally, we are adding a fun feature to the
application to gauge a hotel’s ‘TripAdvisor Bookability
Score’. This will be based on roughly six or seven different
factors to determine how likely it is that a consumer would book that hotel
after seeing it TripAdvisor. I’ll keep you posted on the progress.
TIM: Thanks Mike, and all the best! Hope to see in Vancouver for Canada-e-Connect.
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Written by Jens · Filed Under Hotel Marketing, Jens
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Standing Dog Interactive has signed an agreement with Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide to provide the hospitality company with ReviewAnalyst, an online dashboard for tracking consumer-generated hotel reviews, videos and images on popular travel and social sites. ReviewAnalyst will now provide over 900 Starwood properties the ability to track, analyze and react to online reviews.