Positive Guest Feedback Leads to Large Revenue Increase

10/11/2016
Petit Palace Hoteles is a young, modern hotel chain founded in January 2001 by a group of hotel professionals who previously managed  independent hotels and establishments in hotel networks. At present the chain has 31 hotels in Spain in the cities of Madrid, Barcelona, Bilbao, Valencia, Seville y MÁlaga.
 
These hotel establishments are located by choice in the historic center of big cities. Petit Palace Hoteles mainly occupy landmark buildings that have been fully renovated and transformed into with the latest technological services and high-quality equipment, facilities and fittings.
 
Recently, Petit Palace Hoteles made the decision to operationalize all of the data it had available, publicly and privately, in order to improve guest experiences, increase the number of returning visitors, and boost the number of direct bookings. To do this, it partnered with TrustYou, a guest feedback platform.
 
Specifically, Petit Palace Hoteles implemented three different TrustYou solutions:
 
  • TrustYou Analytics, which allows hotels to categorize and analyze guest feedback;
  • TrustYou Stars, a survey tool that hotels use to encourage guest feedback, and then push those surveys into Google results; and
  • TrustYou Meta-Review, which provides summaries of verified guest reviews from around the web.
 

After the solutions were in place, Petit Palace Hoteles established a series of internal KPI’s, which can be tracked over time and used as a measuring stick for success or failure. Chief among them is a “response rate,” which measures how actively involved management is in addressing guest feedback. This metric allowed hotel leadership to identify which hotel managers were being proactive. A 100% response rate was established as part of each manager’s responsibilities. The company improved its response rate from 28% in 2013 to 95% in 2016.
 
The response rate was also a critical driver of each hotel’s overall score, which looked at guest opinions, manager responses and actions to rectify situations as components of the guest experience. Taken together, Petit Palace Hoteles improved its overall score each year since 2013. In fact, the program has been so successful that many employees’ bonuses are now tied to KPIs that are tracked by TrustYou.
 
To fully understand all guest feedback, the data collected by TrustYou is reviewed in weekly meetings at each location, and also scrutinized by the management board. When necessary, each hotel is responsible for identifying action plans to improve the guest experience; plans are based on incorporating negative feedback and eliminating any concerns that guests have offered.
 
The results of implementing TrustYou’s platform have also gone beyond guest satisfaction, team responsiveness and hotel performance. Generally speaking, guests who fill out surveys after their stay tend to be more positive than those leaving an anonymous review online. For many hotels, this means that the voices of their biggest fans are largely going unheard in web rankings. After all, this data is typically proprietary and unshared. However, the same data also impacts stats that are shared on each hotel’s website, since many travel sites and Petit Palace Hoteles use the same scoring that’s provided by TrustYou.
 
The influx of verified, unbiased and positive responses had a dramatic impact on direct bookings; more than nine in ten hotel booking decisions are informed by online reviews. The improved ranking on sites like Kayak and Skyscanner (to say nothing of Google), increased click through rates on our hotel websites. In fact, Petit Palace Hoteles can identify examples across its properties where the sharing of positive reviews increased its reputation and led to an increase of up to 200% in revenue.
 
The past three years have been tremendous for Petit Palace Hoteles, with significant revenue increases, newfound focus from management, and most importantly, consistent improvements to the guest experience. Without a doubt, the solutions provided by TrustYou have played a critical role in Petit Palace Hoteles’ development, offering actionable insights and identifying opportunities for improvement. It can be difficult to accept that negative feedback is simply a data point, albeit one that can be addressed. But for hotels willing to take a critical look at their guest experiences, they can anticipate dramatic improvement to a huge number of metrics, including the bottom line. 

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