Good Hotel London
Good Hotel London uses the feedback that it gets from GuestRevu to enhance its reach and and further its social causes
The Company
The floating Good Hotel London may have travelled from the Netherlands to London, but the team behind it hope that their message will reach far beyond that. As management and staff focus their attention on social issues, having their guests understand and support their aims, and understanding their guests' needs in turn, is vital. To achieve this, they needed an intuitive and simple system from the right feedback and reputation management partner.
GuestRevu has provided them with the technology that they need to collate their feedback, understand their guest experience, and encourage visitors to post online reviews, enhancing communication with their guests, and boosting their online brand identity.
The Challenges
Getting guests to give honest feedback, getting the insights that they need and spending too much time scanning review sites
• Wanting to see guests coming back again
“We are not a huge chain of hotels,” General Manager, Liutauras “LV” Vaitkevicius explains. “We never wanted and we don't want to be. But we've got this powerful story, powerful business model right behind us. So it's very important for us to ensure that customers are both happy, and also understand what we do, and how, and why we do things here in Good Hotel.”
• Feedback only scratching the surface
“A lot of times we find that customers don't necessarily tell us things in person,” says LV. Guests would often leave without providing feedback about their stay, occasionally following up on a review site, but often without any details getting back to management. “We want the feedback,” LV explains. “We want to understand what it is that guests want.”
• Manual processes taking too much time
In hospitality especially, time is a valuable resource, and much of the staff’s time at Good Hotel London was being spent scouring sites like Booking.com, Expedia, TripAdvisor and Google Reviews for feedback.
The Solution
An intuitive, cloud-based direct guest feedback and online reputation management solution with a two-way Mews PMS integration
GuestRevu’s direct guest feedback and online reputation management (ORM) solutions, which integrate both with TripAdvisor and Mews PMS, allows Good Hotel London’s management to:
- Improve their communication strategy
- Drill down into the crux of their guest experience
- Quickly and easily collate feedback from online sources
- Foster brand awareness and guest loyalty
The GuestRevu tool itself is extremely intuitive. It's very easy to use. It's very easy to navigate. It's very easy to understand. You can pull reports, you can dig into things, you can dive deep if you like, at the same time you can see the high level numbers and choose dates, you can choose sources. So we were really able to understand what our customers are saying about us.
The support we get from GuestRevu, both on account level and technical support, we find that's extremely simple and straightforward... Any questions myself or my team have... within minutes in most cases we got a response from one of your friendly support. It was extremely great.
Dealing with GuestRevu and Mews, it was such an easy, painless process. I believe that comes from the ethos both have where the attitude is: ‘Let's do this. We can do this, and we just get on with it...’ Traditional older systems would... come up with a lot of reasons why not do something rather than how to do something.
The Results
Enhanced communication, happier guests and a better product offering
“Customers are much happier,” says LV. With GuestRevu’s help, Good Hotel London's management is now getting the feedback that they need to understand their guest experience, and educate their guests about their brand identity. “They understand us better, and they are much more in sync with our product and our mission than they were before.”
• Getting all the analytics that they need
With a consolidated dashboard which includes feedback from direct guest surveys and online reviews, Good Hotel London’s management are able to get all of the information that they need at a glance. “At the same time it is extremely analytical and extremely informative,” says LV. “We're able to see all the analytics in one place, we can pull the reports, we can analyze that, without having to waste any time because GuestRevu does it automatically for us. That's the best thing about the system.”
• More Tripadvisor reviews and higher ratings
“In this day and age, Tripadvisor is probably the most important social website for travellers that any hotel or restaurant could use,” LV says. “Like it or hate it, this is that number one tool that all of our guests, all of our customers, use and read and analyse, and try to understand. We quite simply use it each and every day, and that’s where GuestRevu became such an important tool for us.”
Thanks to GuestRevu, Good Hotel London has not only received over 150% more reviews, but they have on average been 8% higher than reviews received organically.
• Recognising the right guests to target
“We're able to understand that customers who have stayed with us before are more likely to leave positive reviews because they understand our concept,” explains LV. “So we’re able to target people that are new to us, perhaps, and improve our storytelling, improve our communication and explain things about our hotel concept and the product much better… We know we're not for everyone and that's absolutely fine with us. We really try to educate the customers that we are a social business. So you'll not find a lot of things that you would find in four or five star boutique hotels. We are much more closer to you, we're much more friendly. We've got heart in our business.”
• More motivated employees and improved service
“The team lives and breathes GuestRevu,” LV announces, proudly. “They check reviews each and every day, they analyse the tool each and every day, and they are actually measured each and every day by how successful we are online. It somehow landed with the teams — they suddenly realised these are the customers that they saw yesterday, or two days ago. These are the guys that were happy, but said it could be better.”