The largest UK hotel group (and with the most followers on Twitter) Premier Inn has decided to integrate TripAdvisor reviews on their website.
2 years ago, I was moderating an Amadeus roundtable and Premier Inn wasn't really convinced yet about what to do with customer reviews from an external party.
More recently, I was invited to participate in another Amadeus Hospitality Roundtable where Luke Goggin from Premier Inn was pretty silent about whether they will integrate reviews on their consumer website after Accor decided last year to embrace reviews on their site.
Premier Inn has made a bold move because their product is probably not the sexiest hotel product to review on sites like TripAdvisor, Vinivi or HolidayCheck. But the brand is consistent and the value proposition is somewhat far greater than other moderate budget hotels anyway. So in my opinion, they are not afraid to show their prospects and customers that most of their guests are happy with their stay. And if they don't, that's ok too because nobody gets 100% perfection and satisfaction (especially in the hospitality world).
Gerard Tempest, the marketing head for Premier Inn, says, ‘Our guest’s opinions are an invaluable source of information for us and we constantly use guest feedback to shape and improve the standards of service available at Premier Inn. We also feel that it is important for visitors to our website to be kept well informed and that they should be able to read impartial and transparent reviews for all of our Premier Inn hotels to enable them to make an informed decision about where they would like to stay.’
Here's an example of how Premier Inn added TripAdvisor reviews on their purple website.
Will other groups follow the same strategy anytime soon? Travelodge, Louvre Hotels, BB Hotels?
The industry is still divided and other sectors too. Check out this recent summary of a panel discussion organised by Travelmole.
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Its fair to say, and i`m talking from experience companies such as the above mentioned have focused very hard on their own internal guest measurement systems.
Thats great for picking up service failure trends, standards issues, brand issues etc,and of course another stick to bash hard working GM`s over the head with, but as an external marketing tool-there pretty much useless!
I think they have woken up to the fact that no matter how many millions they throw into the marketing budget, user generated content is trusted, read and relied upon by millions of TripAdvisor users.
What love is the fact that the playing a very level one now for EVERY hotel from small independent to giant multinational,game on!
Posted by: jonathan | Friday, July 15, 2011 at 04:41 PM