Google has been one of the top hotel review sources over the past several years, along with Booking.com. Therefore, there is always a lot of buzz about hotel reviews on Google and what really drives improvements in ratings, review summaries, and local search rankings for hotels.
Many online reputation providers offer hotels the ability to push their solicited guest reviews directly to Google. Similarlu, TrustYou’s own guest satisfaction survey solution allows hotels to collect guest reviews and then push them to Google as a Google review that is shown below the review summary. But on top of this, TrustYou also provides hotel review scores and review summaries for hundreds of thousands of hotels on Google. These review scores and summaries are calculated based on an analysis of quantity, quality, and recency of reviews across the web as well as from TrustYou Surveys.
TrustYou’s TrustScore and Review Summary on Google
But what does this really mean for hotels and why should they care?
1. Higher Scores
Considering all the sources of hotel reviews (Booking.com, Tripadvisor, Expedia, Facebook, etc.), nearly 50% of all reviews ever collected about a hotel come from their own guest satisfaction surveys. Clients using TrustYou Surveys benefit from an average of 8% higher review scores compared to other sources. Therefore, by posting better rated reviews on Google, the hotel score will be positively impacted.
2. More Influence
TrustYou Surveys seemlessly analyzes and integrates reviews into a hotel’s TrustScore and review summary, thereby influencing TrustYou’s entire review eco-system (Google, Hotels.com, and Bing) and reaching billions of travelers worldwide.
3. Direct Bookings
Hotels have the opportunity to publish review scores, review summaries, and full text reviews from TrustYou Surveys to enrich their own websites’ content. This user-generated content provides significant SEO benefits. Additionally, reviews play a significant role in traveler booking behavior due to the fact that 95% of travelers report reading reviews before making a booking decision. This additional content on the hotel website can encourage more eyes, more clicks, and ultimately, more bookings.
When researching guest feedback solutions or online reputation management providers, hotels should consider all three of these potential areas of impact to ensure they are finding the right fit.
Want more facts? Check out a couple of interesting case studies around this topic here and here.