The trend for social networking has enveloped the region’s hotels, with many on Facebook and Twitter and others actively responding to reviews elsewhere online. The UAE’s social marketing experts explain how to be proactive, not reactive, when it comes to such media.
Let’s start with TripAdvisor. Do online reviews damage hotel brands if they’re bad and how do you capitalise on those ones that are good?
Rob Singleton: It is an ideal social sphere because let’s face it, online is where everything is going, everything is getting digitalised, so what you’ve got is a progression from word of mouth and magazine / newspaper reports to the online page, which can be updated instantly. Anyone can access it, so it can be monitored by us as much as by everybody else.
I got in touch with TripAdvisor to make sure that all the information about the hotel factually was correct and they were using the right photos, but then we welcome any kind of reviews and we want to hear about personal experiences because it’s a lot more believable than me going on and putting up a press release.
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Yvonne Luedeke: First of all, you make sure you have your presence there; this is the one you are always controlling. Then you get the reviews; the majority we receive are positive and you deal with the negative ones on an individual basis.
Sanaz Ghahremani: I personally check our TripAdvisor page on a daily basis. Whether the review is negative or positive, we always send a reply back that acknowledges what the guest has said.
One thing I find really interesting with TripAdvisor is that there are a couple of guests who have given names to our hotel — such as a ‘shopholic’s dream’ and ‘a stopover in luxury’, from someone who came by the metro.
That helps me to know how our guests differentiate the hotel from the market competition. I am thinking about using it in some of our marketing material.
Dima Ayad: The best thing about getting a negative review is to embrace them even though I don’t like to receive them. I embrace them because they are a wake-up call.
People only comment if something is amazing or if it is terribly bad, never anything in between. If something is normal you are never going to hear about it.
Do these reviews mean you now have a much better image of what your guests think about your property?
SG: It definitely helps because I don’t think there are many marketing or PR tools that can help you communicate so much with your guests than social media. It’s on a day-to-day basis, you can be on it for hours and you can see what they’re saying, so it’s really direct.
YL: It’s the only thing where you communicate directly with the customer. With the guest questionnaires you ask them to fill out after their stay, you know how hard it is to get guests to write something.
They are nowadays on their BlackBerrys in the restaurants and they type it in right away. When you get a bad comment, use it as constructive criticism; do not take it personally. We work in hospitality; the customer is king.
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