Survey on Hotel Reputation Management

I would like to share with you this Survey about Hotel Reputation Management for an study I would like to publish at Turismo 2.0

All participants of this survey are given the oportunity to receive the results when we close it.

I understand it will be good a material to analyze and determine the point of view of the industry about customer reviews.

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Mistery is over, the Blogger Hotel unveiled its identity

My name is Eurostars and my surname Madrid and Tower. I mean, my full name is Eurostars Madrid Tower ( “Hotel” for friends)

With these words written by the hotel yesterday the Blogger Hotel unveiled its identity. The Blog of a Hotel, has over 4.000 registered users and more that 500 comments per day, posted by its visitors.

The hotel is located on a privileged site on the main Castellana avenue, inside the Cuatro Torres (Four Towers) Business Area, one of the major areas of economic development in Madrid. This same business park will eventually house the future City of Madrid International Convention Centre.

Some concerns about Blogging and the Conversation

Javier Garcia, started a Meme that consists in having Spanish travel bloggers posting about the reasons why TripAdvisor should join the Conversation and discuss the issues that worry Spanish hoteliers.

I have clear position about this as the hoteliers have already some resources to block third parties use of their brands.

The fact is that TripAdvisor is a company with a business model based on reviews (and advertising, of course). It does not mean it is an Enterprise 2.0 so I see no reason why TripAdvisor must participate in Blog comments or a conversation if they don’t want to.

There are few 2.0 Enterprises, realistically speaking, very few in the tourism sector, may be none. A real 2.0 Company would be a company that promotes and incentivizes R & D through employee participation and collaboration, internally and externally by creating a community with its customers. It would be a company that joins the conversation with its customers with the aim of seeking continuous improvement and customer satisfaction.

We should get back to the real world and not demand anyone else to join our conversation just because we are blogging about it. If we have something to ask, we should honestly knock TripAdvisor’s door and say…

Hello, I would like to ask you a few questions.

That is what I have done.

Tripadvisor & its use of the Hotel’s Brand

There have been some discussions among the Spanish hoteliers since Fitur 2008 regarding the use of the Hotel’s Brand by Tripadvisor with lucrative purposes.

It seems hoteliers, basically independent hotels, are worried about the use of their brand being made by third parties when adding no value to it. In fact they understand that OTA’s add value by enhancing distribution, but review sites like TripAdvisor where anyone can post a review (positive or negative) with no need to demonstrate that ever stayed at that particular hotel, has no added value, despite the importance of transparency for its founder.

I understand that Hotel Chains have the capability to promote themselves on Tripadvisor and generate relevant traffic to their Corporate Websites,but independent hotels are not given a chance to purchase sponsored Links at Tripadvisor.

Are the hotels loosing the control of their brand? In my opinion, major OTA’s bid on hotel brands at their search engine marketing campaigns, and dedicate resources on SEO for brand based keywords. OTA’s have the capability to bid on PPC campaigns at sites like Tripadvisor as well as metasearch engines. Independent hotels have no chance to generate traffic from this sources unless it is intermediated.

Of course a hotel can protect its brand from being used by third parties, but it will definitely impact revenues from OTA’s who, most likely, will penalty that hotel to non-priviledged positions.

I haven’t heard a discussion like this on the english travel blogosphere, and hope somebody will discuss about it.

Is Spain different?

We saw a surprising article at Hotelmarketing yesterday about the development of Travel 2.0 in Spain.

As a blogger and as a marketer who has developed some of the strategies mentioned in the article, I feel myself quite proud of being part of this development. However I feel disapointed that people at Hotelmarketing and Eyefortravel (as the source of the article) need to focus in Spain like they were surprised we could do such things too.

Yes, we use Internet in Spain, and we do have cars too.

Should T-list bloggers learn from the spanish ones?

I’ve seen a lack of communication between the travel bloggers during last weeks. In fact, after some tries of puting things together, it has been impossible to create a real community.

Guido at Happyhotelier, has posted an historical overview of how things evolved since Mathieu from Radaron launched the T-List. By the way, Darren from TravelRants, in a funny (or may be not so funny) would like to let the T-List die. Before the T-list, TiB - TravelinBlogs, was launched by me.

After the T-List, came the L-List launched by A Luxury Travel Blog,

Jens Thraenhart created the T-list group on Facebook. Chris Clarke created an open wiki, and Guillaume Thevenot, is scared about a war of bloggers.

As Happyhotelier pointed, it has been impossible to create a real social network nor a Community. In fact Communication between bloggers goes from one blog to another, but remains in the blogs. I understand that there are many blogs, and each blogger has his particular interests. It is understandable the fear that creating a community out of for own blog will decrease the social interest for your blog.

In my opinion International Travel Bloggers must understand that creating something bigger than their own blog, where they and they blog can be part of it, will denifitely benefit the Travel Industry even more than individual initiatives.

A few months ago I launched among other initiatives, something so simple as a discussion group called Turismo 2.0, so cheap as a Google Group, and asked some fellow bloggers like Alberto Galloso, Andreu Llabrés, Edu William, Isaac Vidal, Javier García Cuenca, Jimmy Pons, Joan Gou, Jorge Gobbi, José A.García, Juan J. Sobejano, Juan Llantada, Nando Llorella, Ruymán García to become part of the group, becoming administrators and promoting the discussion from their blogs as well as by posting content.

We understand that not everybody reads blogs, but everybody has email. Our surprise was that after three months, the number of members of the group is around 400 subscribers, and increasing by 10 new members everyday. Discussions are way more interesting than the ones that take placeat the blogs, as travel proffesionals create their own subjects and discussions. My experience is that since Turismo 2.0 was launched, my blog got even more traffic, but the real point is that we, all together have now more readers, and a greater reach of the content.

We all share data, studies, content, and enthusiasm.

I feel we are doing something great all together, and I’m very proud to be part of a community like this.