Because of the increased reliance on consumer dialogue about travel and the content shared on review websites, the HSMAI Resort Best Practices Initiative undertook an Innovation Study with GuestBook which provides an independent guest review product for hotels (www.guestbookreviews.com).

The HSMAI Resort Best Practices Initiative provides a forum for sales and marketing executives from subscribing resorts to collaborate and share best practices. The Innovation Studies program was launched in 2010 to allow resorts to test new marketing techniques and technologies to determine how effectively they will work in a resort setting. Several resorts volunteer for the controlled trial and the results are documented for the rest of the group and then published in summary to all HSMAI members. The study was facilitated by Cindy Estis Green, managing partner with the Estis Group and research director for the HSMAI Resort Best Practices Group.

GuestBook uses an invitation system to restrict posts to actual guests. GuestBook enables a hotel to invite guests to post reviews as part of their post-stay email surveys as well providing the invitations to guests in their guest room invitation folders or as part of their folio. The resorts participating in the study used email surveys to invite guests to post reviews. The survey vendor, UniFocus, then automatically sent the data from these surveys to GuestBook using GuestBook's "web service".

The results of the trial with the HSMAI Resort Best Practices Group confirmed that guests would post reviews to GuestBook when they receive an invitation. The number of reviews posted on GuestBook each month equaled or exceeded the number posted on TripAdvisor. In addition, the number of reviews posted on TripAdvisor did not suffer any reduction over the test period, so it appears that these are guests who would not have otherwise posted a review. It was felt to be a tool that would help in attracting consumers with a bias to positive reviews. As this was a study for a resort group, the majority of the reviews were from leisure guests.

The response from the trial participants was positive and their input was that GuestBook was easy to set up and use and required very limited maintenance.

They felt that there was value in embedding consumer reviews on their own website and thus reducing the need for consumers to leave their website to research reviews. This minimizes the potential for visitors to book a competing property based on advertising and saves the commission if booked on a third-party website. For example, The Steamboat Grand provides a link on its home page to a separate page on its website which displays the reviews: http://steamboatgrand.com/reviews/

One of the issues for the participating resorts was the concept of posting negative reviews on their website. According to a survey of more than 2,100 travelers conducted by Forrester reveals that management responses to reviews, both positive and negative, has a positive effect. The idea that there are balanced reviews and not just positive ones reassures the consumer that the reviews are not manufactured. To allow properties to manage the review process, GuestBook provides a portal to post a response to any posted review.

GuestBook does not keep posted reviews indefinitely, but removes them after 18 months to allow guests to see the most recent and relevant ones.

The study was unable to determine how many guests were actually influenced to book after reading the reviews. This was not possible to determine using Google Analytics because so many visitors go into the booking engine just to see prices and availability. In order to determine increased bookings, the resorts would have needed to implement tracking of GuestBook cookies and this was not done during the test. During the trial, the test websites deployed limited references to GuestBook and indicated that they felt traffic to the website would be improved if they had put links or buttons on more pages of the website and on Facebook.

Conclusions:

Peer reviews are becoming more important to potential guests and reviews from impartial third-party websites with validated guest reviews are a critical part of the booking process. The challenge is to allow potential guests to see reviews without leaving the hotel or resort website. If a hotel offers a link to a third-party website that requires the visitor to leave the resort website to see reviews, it is difficult to know how many of these potential guests will return to the hotel website for booking.

One option is for hotels to implement their own system as Starwood has recently done, but apart from reviews posted by members of their Starwood frequent traveler program, this requires the staff to manually verify that the guest has actually stayed at one of its hotels before posting a review. The GuestBook system is a cost effective and viable solution for even the smallest resort with a limited staff because it provides an efficient means to validate guests who post reviews and it is easy to implement and maintain.

The idea of negative reviews, while a concern to hoteliers, is actually somewhat reassuring to potential guests. If all of the reviews are positive, it is not as believable as a balanced range of reviews. Management response goes a long way to reassuring the website visitors that the hotel is involved and concerned about any problems and will work to resolve them.

"We felt GuestBook struck a good balance between functionality and ease of use and fills a strategic niche for moderated third-party guest reviews" according to James Leitess, E-Business Manager of Steamboat Ski & Resort Corporation and one of the trial resorts in the HSMAI Best Practices Innovation study.

About the Author

Maureen O'Hanlon, CTC, a twenty-five year veteran of the travel and hospitality industry is currently a Senior Partner with The Prism Partnership, a leading hospitality technology and marketing consulting firm serving the hospitality industry.