Leading a company to success is a tiresome task that requires knowledge in various disciplines. You need to know how to probably manage employees to make them productive and happy. You have to develop good business relationships if you want corporate customers to stay with you - and you have to be strong at making every customer experience positive!
The hotel industry is exactly in that situation: if you do not make your customers happy from the start, they will not return to your hotel and you will quickly lose some market shares to your competitors. Since hotel management is not a simple task, here are a few tips to help you to start in the industry.
Managing online reputation carefully
Facebook and Twitter are part of most people's lives, but it doesn't mean that they are the only channels to consider when you are monitoring your online reputation. In fact, most customers will look at review sites when they need to find a new hotel while they travel. If people cannot find you online or if they read horrible stuff about your company, you could be missing out on a huge business opportunity. Concretely, this means the following things:
- Encourage people to review your website online. They say that one bad customer is as loud as nine good customers. If you want to counter people that are trash talking your hotel on TripAdvisor or other hotel directories, why not give incentives to people to go online and give you sincere ratings? For example, you could organize giveaways amongst the customers who gave a review to your hotel. Of course, do not offer privileges to people who gave good ratings: this could look fishy and create a backlash effect.
- Swiftly deal with angry people. If you hear of a customer who is having a bad experience in your hotel, do not wait until he complains to compensate him or solve the issue. If you do wait, his experience will be so frustrating that he could decide to throw some dirt at you by negatively promoting your hotel to friends, families and online customers.
- Use content marketing to drive social media sharing. Saying "my hotel is the best" does not make it anymore as a great way to bring customers. Create value for your target market by writing top quality articles on subjects that are relevant to them. For example, if you are managing an old hotel in Montreal, write about different activities that tourists can enjoy in your neighborhood like what they can do and visit in Montreal and so on. If you feature very interesting stuff about the surroundings and the city, people will come to your hotel for sure.
Getting your name out on search engines
Most people still use Google as a primary mean to find information on their destination. The technology giant is making the game increasingly harder for people to perform search engine optimization activities: the best way for managers to be found with Google right now is by using its Google Local feature. You'll have to create yourself a Google Local page and then give it some notoriety by registering your hotel in different local directories on the World Wide Web. It is also said that consumers' reviews give you a positive boost in local search rankings: once again, motivate people to talk about you!
Google is also gradually rolling out other updates to take further control of search results and lead hotels to spend on advertising. The Google Hotel Finder allows you to pay to allow users to directly book an hotel room using its services. It can be compared to Adwords for hotels.
You should not only rely on search engines to survive, as they can be very unpredictable, but learn to use them as allies. Having a tech-savvy manager in your team is always very useful!
Looking for even more tips on the subject? Watch the following video for 10 tips on hotel management.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJMfNTo3QgA]
