Suite Spot host, Ryan Embree, and Travel Media Group Director of Product – Respond and Resolve™, Jackie Avery, break down the top 5 guest sentiment tags of 2024 and give explain what insights these tags hold for hoteliers. 

Tune in to the first episode of 2025 and learn how to leverage this data for your hotel portfolio to kick off the new year.

Episode Transcript
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Ryan Embree:
Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in, and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree. Thank you for listening or watching wherever you’re joining us from, hopefully watching in our brand new Suite Spot podcast here in Maitland, Florida. Very excited to bring you another great episode, a very popular episode with a lot of hoteliers, wanting to know some of the top five sentiments of this last year. So it’s one of my personal favorite episodes and a personal favorite guest, Jackie Avery, our Director of Product Respond and Resolve™, which is our review response solution, award-winning review response solution here at Travel Media Group. Jackie, thank you so much for joining me back on the Suite Spot.

Jackie Avery:
Yeah, thanks, Ryan. It’s so great to be here. I look forward to this every year. I’m so passionate about this and just spending the time reflecting on the past 12 months and what really resonated with travelers.

Ryan Embree:
Absolutely. What do you think of the new studio?

Jackie Avery:
I love it. It looks so good. So comfortable here. You know, I am so happy to be back.

Ryan Embree:
Awesome. Well, we’re happy to have you back. Let’s get into it. Let’s start talking some numbers. If you’ve heard this before, this isn’t kind of an annual tradition that we do at the end of the year, but we look at all of the guest sentiment that travelers left. For those that might, again, this might be their first time listening to this style of episode, give us a quick definition of guest sentiment and reviews and maybe some numbers that go along with that.

Jackie Avery:
Yeah, absolutely. So, if it’s your first time here, you just wanna refresh. Thanks for listening. You know, we love that you’re taking this time to really, dig in and learn some, some of this stuff and kind of, you know, again, reflect on what travelers care about. So guest sentiment, these are things being mentioned in reviews, right? So, as Ryan mentioned, I’m overseeing the review response team here at Travel Media Group, and my team to kind of put it into perspective number wise, during our slower months, we’re processing and looking at 25,000 reviews ish, during peak travel season. That number jumps up to mid to high thirties. So, as we’re going through this and kind of sharing reflections and really, you know, deep diving, the information that we’re going over today is coming from right around 41 million sentiment tags.

Ryan Embree:
WoW, that’s absolutely incredible. You think about that 25,000 per month to about 30, you know, high thirties, but 41 million in sentiment tags. So not only are guests leaving the reviews at a record pace, but they’re also talking about so much about the guest experience. And I think that’s really important when we talk about this type of episode because there’s so many elements to a guest day, things that can go right, things that can obviously go wrong that we hear about in these reviews and see in these reviews. And today we’re gonna review the top five sentiments. Let’s go ahead and start at number five.

Jackie Avery:
Yeah, absolutely. Before we jump in real quick, I wanna say, because you said there might be some people listening this year who weren’t here last year. I know that a lot of times, you know, negative reviews gets a lot of talk time, it gets a lot of focus, right? You may have your team meetings, you may be going over data, and you know, you’re kind of focusing on the negatives. Again, this year, similar to last year, we saw the trend that more often than not, travelers were leaving positive remarks and there were positive sentiment tags. So, going through this, I am gonna try to point out the times where there were higher neutral or negative tags just to kind of pinpoint like, Hey, where’s the discrepancy there? But kind of speaking with that, I would love to kind of jump in. So number five, our fifth most common sentiment tag this year was facility amenities showing up over 2.8 million times. So this tag can often be seen alongside things like price, food, and odor. And while those three, they’re not in the top five, I mentioned them because those three specifically. So again, price, food, and order, they have a higher neutral, negative combined, number than the sum, that sum is higher than the positive tag.

Ryan Embree:
Sure. And you know, one of the things we hear, I mean, price, right? Big industry news, not just in hospitality, but overall is inflation, right? The price of things and what a room might cost this year in comparison to maybe back in 2020 could be significantly different. So if you, if the guest comes in with those different expectations because they paid this price and they’re not seeing it, that might be something there where that neutral or negative sentiment comes into play. Same with odor. It’s typically something that when we talk about odor and you bring that up in a review, you know, unless you have a really nice fragrance in the lobby, perhaps that that new car smell or something like that, it’s usually not gonna be met with positive sentiments surrounding it. So let’s go ahead and move on to four.

Jackie Avery:
Yeah. So fourth, pretty fitting kind of with what we were talking about, uh, is gonna be cleanliness. So that came up over 3 million times. And this is often mentioned alongside of beds or bathrooms. And so while all three of those tags were primarily positive, they do have a high neutral second place. So when you consider that, you know, overall the experience was a positive one, many travelers still note this kind of feeling where, okay, it could have been a little better, or they have these hint of almost dissatisfaction. So I think that’s important to note because you wanna really dig in and find out, like, you know, where am I on the cusp of losing this positive feeling for my guests? Or where am I just like, okay, I know I’m, I’m exactly where I need to be. Yeah,

Ryan Embree:
Yeah. Cleanliness, something that’s been obviously, I don’t think we’re ever going to do a top five episode sentiment episode without mentioning cleanliness. It’s just such a priority in the guest experience. And one of the first things you’re gonna notice when you open that door for the first time, the first thing you do and we talked about on this episode, it’s not even the cleanliness sometimes of the room. I think when people think about cleanliness, they think about, they go directly to, well, it’s a, uh, it’s not a clean room or it’s an unclean room, whereas they might’ve seen trash in the hallways, right? Uh, food service that was left out in the hallways, dirty elevators, your lobby. Uh, so there’s so many things that go into that sentiment tag of cleanliness. It’s important not to just to look through the silo of just saying, this is just a room issue. It could be an overall cleanliness issue.

Jackie Avery:
Absolutely.

Ryan Embree:
Let’s move on to number three.

Jackie Avery:
So looking to number three in third place, we have location. So this can often be mentioned alongside noise, parking, and safety. It’s important to note, because I think often people write this off like, oh, it’s something I can’t change, right? But I really challenge everyone to change their perception on that, to really think, was there anything that I could have done more proactively or anything that my team could have done if a concern was brought to their attention? So for example, noise, noise came up over 890,000 times. Around 400,000 times that sentiment was negative. So was there information that could have been provided or is there a way that the team could have been empowered to more properly address a concern? If it was something that did come up that couldn’t be avoided, and then I would say, really thinking about that, if nope, there was nothing that could have been done, you know, this is what happened, I would then reflect on, okay, well did that guest get a very genuine response? And, you know, kind of communication from your team.

Ryan Embree:
Yeah. Location is always gonna be in play, right? It’s very much like cleanliness. If you’re 30 miles away from where you want or need to be, you’re going to be at a disadvantage from a hotel. That might just be a few steps away from that. But in saying that, the onus is on the hotel to really paint a picture of location of where they are. Oh, you know, we’ve had reviews that we’ve responded to where someone has presented themselves as near the airport and near the airport could be 30 minutes away to one person. It could mean I only wanna be five minutes away from the airport. So it’s really important, like you said, Jackie, just to, I would say, try to look through a traveler’s perspective, maybe even someone that you don’t know and send them, whether it be your social media, whether it be your reputation, and say, without looking at my location on a map, tell me what you can gather from these data points. Because this is what the traveler, the prospective traveler is seeing. And if they can paint a pretty accurate picture of, well, it sounds and looks like you’re near a bunch of restaurants, it sounds, it looks like you’re near this or that, or these attractions in the area, then you’re hitting it spot on with location. And sometimes, I know we’ve mentioned a couple negative things about location, but positively too, right? Everyone has some probably great restaurants that, you know, I’ve been a front desk agent before, and that business traveler or family goes, I just want a good place to eat. I want to eat like a local, what do you recommend? So being able to make sure, because some of these mentions are really positive and saying that it’s great, it’s near great shopping, great attraction dining, use this to your advantage. So locations such a, such a great tag. Moving into the top two now.

Jackie Avery:
Yeah. So our second most popular tag in 2024 was staff with over 4 million mentions, and over 3 million of those being positive. What a testament it is to just the impact that team members have on a traveler’s experience. Almost every single tag can somehow be related to staff. So if you think about it, right, there’s a server at breakfast who really just brings joy in the morning, or unfortunately there’s a plumbing concern, but there’s a team member who went above and beyond to make sure that the rest of this day was wonderful or you were staying somewhere to celebrate something special. And instead of it being a one-off that now, you know, a special event has become your tradition. So team members really just can be connected to so many other tags. So we just, I’d love to see when it’s positive. I love reading when travelers are expressing joy about things that they’re experiencing on site.

Ryan Embree:
I mean, that is absolutely incredible to think that number two, the number two most talked about thing on online reviews is your staff. And it’s something that when we’re talking about prospective travelers, it’s something that you can see, shine through your reviews, but you don’t know who works there, right? You don’t know the individuals that work there. You can know everything you can about the location, you can know everything about the price, you can know a lot of these different factors, but one thing you don’t know is about the staff, but yet it’s the number two most talked about subject. And in a time where a lot of hoteliers out there are still struggling and have this staffing shortage, it’s a testament to what you said that the majority of this is really positive sentiment. And that’s great. I mean, that always should be the case in hospitality where it is hotels, hosting people, people serving people is what is what we say. Right? So great to hear, great to see. You know, I think a great, this is a also a great reminder for the hotels listening to this episode that I love the fact that this year, this format, we’ve changed a little bit up and talked about, the negative and positive. Sometimes those swings there because I think it is, if you are seeing that maybe you are more of a 50/50 split on your staff and your personal reviews, there’s a gap there, right? So it is, it is a great time to reflect this time of year and say, all right, what do we want to focus in on? What are we maybe falling short of and the guest expectations or, or guest experience at our hotel? So here it is, the audience has been waiting, we’ve been building it up. Jackie, what is the number one top sentiment of 2024?

Jackie Avery:
Yeah, it can’t be beat, everybody is talking about it with close to 7.5 million mentions, we have accommodations. So right around 2.8 million of those were neutral and negative tags, meaning over 4 million were positive. People felt comfortable, they liked their space and they had a lot to say, beds as mentioned over 1.6 million times, room amenities, 2.5, obviously it’s not all good. Pests came up over 200,000 times and furniture had a significantly more neutral and negative tag than positive. But it’s really interesting to see because, you don’t need to guess. They’re telling you exactly what they like and what they don’t like about your specific property.

Ryan Embree:
Yeah. Well, and that is the product that essentially we are selling to our customers, right? It is the room. So you can learn a lot from that. There’s a lot of aspects that go into it. Cleanliness being one of them, one of the other tags that we talked about. But at the end of the day this is where we’re hosting our guests. This is where they’re sleeping. So no, I don’t think it’s any surprise that accommodations and rooms is the number one sentiment tag. This is, I always love looking at this. I always love really dissecting the data during this episode. Obviously you and your team respond to a lot of reviews. I asked you off air how many reviews we’re up to at this point.

Jackie Avery:
Yeah, we’re just a little over a 1.9 million. So it’s exciting stuff going on here.

Ryan Embree:
And hopefully 2 million, we will hit some point in 2025. A fantastic milestone we’re all looking forward to. But, you know, with that much experience, when you see some of these tags, whether positive, neutral or negative, I guess maybe, I think we’re always getting questions from hoteliers of how can I be the best review response writer out there? What, what advice would you give them?

Jackie Avery:
Yeah. So I guess to kind of pre answer that question. First thing I would say is, of course, if in the moment if something has gone right or something has gone wrong, empower your team members to properly handle situations, have training on site, use the information that you’ve learned when you’ve reflected on the past year and really, go through that with your team. But let’s say you didn’t know, let’s say they didn’t stop by the front desk. They had an early morning checkout or you know, your team did everything they could.

Ryan Embree:
Mobile Check out. Walked right by.

Jackie Avery:
Exactly. Yeah, you might not know. So, you know, let’s say they left a review, that guess deserves a genuine response. You have to be open to feedback, you have to really hear what they’re saying, and they deserve a real reply. They don’t need a template where, you know, you don’t care at all. It seems like you don’t care. You can make things right by hearing them, by being empathetic by truly, listening and responding to them in a real way.

Ryan Embree:
Yeah, authenticity is a big word that we use around here. And having an authentic, empathetic and genuine response to feedback. We can tell as travelers, as consumers, when something is, is genuine, when something is empath empathetic and authentic. And if you can get that feeling and that sentiment in the, the traveler that left that feedback feeling that way, that’s what you can do. You know, and going back to your empowerment, your team empowerment point there, I just want to talk about how many times we’ve seen in reviews empowerment or what your staff has done to try to improve a situation. If it’s negative, right? That I was having this issue and then it was solved by Jackie. And that is such a cool testament to see online because that shows service in action, right? Your customer service is not just implied, it’s not a five star review, but it’s actually shown that there was an issue, there was resolution, and that’s shown online. It can’t, you can’t ask for a better story there. So empowering your team to make those changes, however, however that may be at your hotel, however it operates, sometimes that can show in your reviews, and we’ve noticed that before.

Jackie Avery:
Absolutely. And right, that guest, they left your property and they took the time to highlight the team member who made it right, or to highlight the policy that you had in place that did improve their state. They did not have to do that, but they did. They didn’t just share the negative that went wrong. They then told the whole story and you should then take the time to thank them for that time, show how much you appreciate their flexibility, their willingness to be open to the stay turning around and ending up positively. You wanna actually hear what they’re saying and give them that time because they gave it to you.

Ryan Embree:
Great point. That’s a great point. We can, we could probably do a whole episode on responding to reviews. I know we’ve done tons of webinars, masterclasses, bootcamps, they’re all over our TMG YouTube Channel. If you are interested in hearing more of this and some of the tips that Jackie and her team of professional writers here at Travel Media Group, takes such great care of our hotel partners. So thank you for spending a little time with us, judging by these numbers. It is not slowing down and you are very, very busy over there in the Respond and Resolve™ department. So thank you for taking some time and sitting down with us.

Jackie Avery:
Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me. It’s, it’s always a great time.

Ryan Embree:
Awesome. Well, we’ll talk to you next time on the Suite Spot. Thank you for listening. To Join our Loyalty program. Be sure to subscribe and give us a five star rating on iTunes. Suite Spot is produced by Travel Media Group. Our editor is Brandon Bell with Cover Art by Bary Gordon. I’m your host Ryan Embree, and we hope you enjoyed your stay.