Undoubtedly, online reputation management is one of the main operational touchpoints for a hotel chain with its customers and, as an obvious consequence for local visibility, one of the fundamental elements to achieve maximum visibility in searches by geolocation and/or generic hotel in Madrid and pet-friendly hotel in Madrid, respectively, in destinations with high hotel competition.
Encouraging user reviews is an excellent way to gain that extra local visibility among hotels, especially if a hotel’s value proposition can support a considerable volume of positive opinions due to the experience it offers in relation to its location, services, customer service, and customer orientation… and it is usually one of the objectives in managing a hotel’s Local SEO under an axiom assumed by the entire community that the more reviews, the better…
However, stimulating users to leave their opinions in the form of reviews has an obvious counterpart, which is the need to respond to customer comments in essentially a double logic:
1. Reply to the user who has made the review with a message in which we attend to and value its content and in this way
2. Respond to the experience that the following users who want to know more about our hotel will have
Therefore, when we respond to a review, we are not only responding to the user who left that review but also, in a sense, communicating with the following users who are interested in our hotel.
An immense management of reviews ends up generating a multitude of problems and situations that only those who manage these reviews understand (and suffer) both because of the high number, internal noise, and implications they have, as well as the difficulty in resolving cases through the review removal forms. Being a hotel director and responding to customers can be a very thankless job.
In this sense, Google My Business (yes, its name is Google Business Profile) is a platform whose case resolution is not up to the user experience offered by Google Maps, for example, and usually gathers unanimous criticism among the SEO and online reputation community due to the difficulty of resolving problematic reviews quickly, beyond the policies that officially allow reporting a review, which are:
– Out of context content. The review does not correspond to an experience offered by this company
– Spam. The review is from a bot or a fake account, or contains advertisements and promotions
– Conflict of interest. The review is from an entity associated with the company or a competing company
– Offensive language. The review contains offensive words or sexually explicit language, or refers to graphic violence
– Harassment or bullying. The review personally attacks someone
– Discrimination or incitement to hatred. The review includes offensive language about a person or group due to their identity
– Personal information. The review includes personal information, such as an address or phone number
– Not helpful. The review does not help users decide whether to go to this place or not
The way to report a review is both public (any user can report an infringement on a review of any business, whether it is a hotel or not) and private (with access to that business’s profile in Google My Business).
What recent developments allow us to better manage our hotel’s reputation with Google My Business?
The recent development is that Google now has a new form to resolve review complaints, which aims to complement the option of reporting from the profile or the review itself with the advantage that it will also facilitate better follow-up of those reported reviews with their status.
The steps to do this are as follows:
1. Choose the account that has access to the profile.
2. Select a business to write a review for. You can search in the list offered by the application or directly through the options it offers, very useful for email accounts with access to dozens and hundreds of profiles.
3. Request to report a review. We choose the browser option to access the list of reasons for the report.
4. Report the review. It is about effectively choosing the reason why we want to report the review. If the problem clearly fits into one of them, it is convenient to choose that option. If not, the first option of Out of context content tends to be the best choice.
5. Reported review. From the report of the same, Google indicates that in 3 business days they will contact us via email and offers us a second option which is to follow up on such report on this same platform.
You could also be interested in our latest post, Changes in the documentation for Google Hotel’s Sustainability policies.
0
