Hoteliers: Understand and improve your brand through social media sentiments

With the rising reputation of consumer generated review and media websites, it is vital for hotels to ensure a strong presence on all the major sites. Positive reviews can ensure a strong base for future bookings, while lots of negative sentiments on web can wipe off the hotels future booking potential. As per a study over two-third of the consumers surveyed mentioned online consumer reviews are one of the most trusted forms of advertising.

In today’s super interactive and highly socialized online space, hotels should have adequate marketing budget for handling the property’s online reputation on the major review sites and social media.  Social posts and reviews, offer up the power of persuasion for numerous online customers. Whether the review is scornful or exceptional, it will influence guests to either book accommodations at a particular hotel or give a pass. Moreover, booking sites, travel search sites and various review sites offer fantastic value to your SEO strategy, while concurrently leveraging the consumer generated media buzz and social integration factors. They not only drive quality traffic to your site and in turn business, but more importantly they help you to protect your brand as well.

It is not just adequate to get good reviews in major sites like Hotels.com, Expedia and Yelp, the marketing team of the hotel needs to be part of the discussions as well and respond to comments, queries to give a message to customers that they care for them. You need to reply instantly to negative reviews and for good ones, thank the guests for their positive feedbacks. By replying to reviews you are not only ensuring that you are making guests feel that you care about their experience, but you are also keeping your reviews fresh which is more likely to provide brand protection, drive bookings, improve guest experience based on what’s working well and what’s not for the hotel guests. Using complete 3C listening methodology (Customers, Competitors, and Competitors customers), we help brands drive better customer experiences and increase revenue.

To showcase the real impact, Fusion Analytics World now analyzes the sentiments flowing around major hotels:

1. Sentiment Balance:

Sentiment balance shows the proportionate balance of positive and negative sentiments expressed in conversations from social media. Fusion Analytics World automatically categorizes data under positive, negative and neutral sentiment using advanced text analysis and natural language processing.

The chart clearly indicates that Carlson Hotels has the overall best sentiment balance followed by Best Western and Accor Group. On the other hand, Choice Hotels has the worst sentiment balance followed by Sheraton since difference between their positive and negative sentiments is the least among the major hotels that Fusion Analytics World is tracking.

Marriott with high volume and high negative sentiment indicates most of the conversations are not what their PR and Marketing teams would like to see. Insights like these help brands take immediate actions before things go out of control, especially by knowing the topics of discussion elaborated in the next section.

2. Understanding the Conversation Map:

The Fusion Analytics World analysis goes deeper into the data to understand through conversation map about what customers talk on social media. For the convenience of hoteliers, bubble shows the size of each conversation topic, and lines connecting the bubbles show how frequently these different topics were discussed together on the same mention (i.e., tweets or blogs etc). –

Rooms & Food, Service & Customer Experience, Gym and Spa & Beaches, Bars & Lounge, Restaurants & Staff were some of the top conversation topics discussed on the same mention around hotel brands. Understanding relative proportions of discussions with the help of above visualizations can help marketers’ device appropriate promotions. For example understanding that discussions around Service is 2 times more popular than Customer Experience, discussions related to Rooms are way more popular than Rates etc., can help in leveraging appropriate topics for their next marketing campaign.

3. Understanding the positive and negative topics

To recognize the causes responsible, we have used advanced deep text analytic techniques to identify the common negative themes present in these mentions. Image above shows a word cloud of the most common positive and negative themes present in mentions for hotel brands.

The top negative themes emerging from the above analysis for hotels are regarding their front desk staff and unpleasant deals related experiences. It looks like their customers are not really enjoying these as much as Hoteliers would want them to. Looking further, we also find that people are showing displeasure related to bills, internet speed, hotel bathroom related experiences. The key positive mentions are regarding breakfast, introductory offers, loyalty programmes, internet charges, health education. Interesting to note while customers are happy with internet rates, however, they have shown concern regarding internet speed. Insights like these can help hotels take immediate action so as to increase satisfaction of customers and reduce negative sentiments flowing.

Kalyan Banga

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