When things go wrong
In an ideal world, your hotel could do no wrong in the eyes of your loyal Facebook fans, Twitter followers, and the rest of your social media following.
Unfortunately, there is a lot that can go wrong in a hotel, on the worse end of the scale are incidents from thieving staff and guest injuries to an outbreak of food poisoning or a terrorist scare, for example.
As a hotel, it is important to know about such incidents, communicate with those involved and resolve outstanding issues.
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If you hear of negative experiences via a guest complaint on a social media platform, the whole world is listening. If you fail to adequately resolve the complaint, the whole world makes a mental note to avoid your hotel.
If the complaint involves a potentially legal matter, such as claims against the hotel in cases of theft or injury, Kubler advises the hotel to consult a lawyer to approve a statement to be posted.
“It’s nearly always possible to post a public statement,” he says, adding that hotels should not try to prevent people from commenting on the situation.
“It’s better to keep the doors of communication open. If you have 10 people booking into your hotel and they’re all complaining, you don’t lock the doors”.
“However, there may be extreme circumstances where yes, the wall may have to be turned off, because some information at the time cannot be made public. Again, it’s all about communication, so you post the statement,” Kubler says.
“In Ireland a hotel had an outbreak of a vomiting virus and had to close during investigations into the cause, there’s nothing the hotel could do about it.
It turned off its Facebook wall for a couple of days while awaiting confirmation whether the hotel was at fault or not. When it transpired that the hotel wasn’t at fault, it posted a statement with the evidence.”
Parsons says replying to every single negative post during such an incident only fuels the fire.
“The storm will die down, but often what happens in the case of a very bad incident is the hotel tries to engage with everyone who has commented on it. A lot of the time you’ve got people that want to join in the discussion for the sake of it”.
For smaller matters, Kreata Global Digital Media Services business director Sujith Mathew says take the negative sentiment and convert it into a positive.
“Social media is a platform to acknowledge it, address it and correct it – converting a negative sentiment to a positive sentiment. There are two ways of doing this. Often you can block explicit words, the second, and most important step, is just to face it.
“Call the concerned person or send a private message and take hold of the situation. About 90% of people will be happy because you communicated with them,” says Mathew.
Furthermore, it is important not to forget that feedback received from social media is a big asset to hotels.
“We appreciate the feedback that our guests provide us with. In today’s technology-driven world, travellers expect a dialogue with their favourite brands, where social media plays a key role,” says Starwood’s Jain.
“Travellers today know what they want and when they want it, and they expect personalised attention and experiences.
“Our social media platforms are linked back to our website where we give our guests the opportunity to review their experiences directly through ratings and reviews,” he adds.
Once the problem is resolved, communications should also be posted online, where the original complaint was posted, according to Kubler.
The why
When all appropriate preparation and planning has been done, you’ve published the day’s insightful posts, converted negative sentiments to positive and finished your afternoon cup of tea and half hour or so of monitoring, you may stop and think ‘what is the point’.
Even if you only started developing your hotel’s social medial presence because every other hotel was on Facebook, or the job rather rudely landed on your desk, done properly you’ll soon be glad you did.
While our experts say direct return on investment, in terms of direct bookings, can be difficult to monitor, they say the exposure for your hotel’s brand, and the added channel for engagement with your guests and colleagues is priceless.
“Social Media is not a fad anymore and it needs to be taken seriously by all hotels. It is no longer a question of whether hotels should use social media or not, but how effectively these channels are being utilised to improve the brand recognition —loyalty is paramount,” concludes Le Méridien Dubai’s Zakir.
QUICK CASE STUDY 3
The Hotel: Dubai Marriott Hotels
The Leader: Aftab Sayed, senior e-commerce manager
Objective
To improve the social media presence of the Dubai hotels, in accordance with Marriott’s social media guidelines
Strategy
We have the e-commerce team going to various trainings on social media via Marriott channels and then cascade this information down to all the relevant departments. All our social media activities are managed in-house.
Every time we have an update, all the relevant hotel teams are given trainings on the updates to be aware of new implementations and policies.
We also have a dedicated system set up to monitor and track negative and positive posts; we use a tool to see what the sentiment is for each segment.
It allows us to get all the information in one place and for us to reach out and see how we can better guest experiences.
This is all managed centrally via the Dubai cluster and cascaded down to each property involving champions from each department at a property level.
Results
We started out with a basic Facebook page for all our properties in accordance with our Marriott social media guidelines.
We started engaging our following more in 2012 and have seen remarkable results in terms of reach. We do not engage in Twitter for all our hotels, mostly just for the JW Marriott Marquis Hotel Dubai. We are going to focus on Facebook, Foursquare and Pinterest for 2013.
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