Reputation management

"United Breaks Guitars", a classic reputation management case

1) Why the guitar is important? The guitar is important because is the main attribute of the musician, Dave Carroll and his band Sons of Maxwell.

2) What is the brand? The brand involved in the video is United Airlines, an American major airline headquartered in Chicago, Illinois.

3) What is the problem? The problem is that United Airlines employees were throwing guitars in the luggage without any care, and the band was alerted by customers. They raised the awareness of the United's employees about this issue but they didn't seem to take in account their view about this.

4) How long did it take to fix the problem? The saga lasted one year, and after no  compensation made by the company, his band decided to make the song "United Breaks Guitars" which was an instant hit and went viral explaining the problem he faced with the airlines company. In result, United Airlines reputation was severely damaged by this song.

Define Reputation Management

Olery Reputation evaluates the online reputation of a hotel by extracting information from review sites and social media. Reputation Management is a powerful tool in order to judge the credibility of a brand, or in this case the hotel in the mindframe of the customer.


Services

Olery Reputation enables hotel chains and managers to:

• Get actionable insights about improving service
• See how to out-perform their competition
• Translate foreign text immediately
• Create team awareness by sharing knowledge
• At-a-glance view of a hotel’s online performance with reports
• Build relationships with guests by acting immediately on comments

Olery Reputation monitors all these sites for you—nearly 100 sources, from Agoda to Zoover—so you can get a handle on your hotel reputation management and identify real trends.

Why it is important? (Hotel Impact)

This increasing market transparency can adversely or favorably impact the margins, market share and brand equity of hotels. The Olery Reputation real-time monitoring and strategic analytics allows hotels to react instantly to both positive and negative reviews, and gain a better understanding of what their guests are thinking.

Sell "Your solutions" (Independent Hotels)

This tool keeps hotel operators informed in real-time about what guests say about their hotel – and their competitor’s – and helps to better engage guests and to put user reviews into actionable business intelligence to improve operations.

Olery is a great tool to understand the performance of our hotels from the guest’s point of view.
Olery gives also the opportunity to even take quicker action on reviews received.

Guests can choose among eight different languages when taking Olery's surveys, it's quick to set up and allows to give instant results (surveys responses are transmitted instantly to your dashboard) and it also gives actionable insights (the use of real feedback to drive decisions about how to run your independt hotel).

 Key Take Away of Trip Advisor Webinar Seminar

• The power of social media (half their revenues come from their own website and they have so much demand engineered by their reputation and social media that they don't need to pay other companies to generate revenue for them.

• 3 Main Steps for Reputation Creation : 1 hire happy people, 2 Smile at Guests, 3 Create your Reputation.

• Establish mechanisms to organize it all : organize uploads, centralize access, share the content.

• The importance of management responses to guests' complaints.

Should a Hotel use TA reviews in their site 

In my opinion, hotels should use Trip Advisor reviews on their site as most of the potential customers recognize this OTA as a reliable tool in order to jude a hotel reputation.

Should the Hotel encourage customers to comment on TA

I would recommend customers to comment on Trip Advisor, in this way it allows the creation of a communication channel between the Hotel and the customers. They can leave good or bad reviews, and according to them, the management team of the Hotel can address their thanks, or apologies and address those issues accordingly.

Opinion : Use Trip Advisor or your own platform

Trip Advisor is known worldwisde and might allow a certain a credibility to the Hotel that wants to have a parnership with this OTA. However in this case maybe opening your own platform might be a wiser decision because involving themselves with Trip Advisor may involve higher costs, and also prevents a wider visibility than Google review provides for example.