In this special edition of the Suite Spot, we take a look at the Top 5 trending tags in online reviews today. Host, Ryan Embree is joined by the leader of the Travel Media Group review response team, Patrick O’Brien. Patrick and Ryan countdown each review sentiment tag, explaining what Patrick’s team looks for in the review and how they approach their response. They also give valuable tips on how to market the tags that are trending positively for your hotel and fix the tags that are trending negatively.

If you are interested in joining Travel Media Group as an online review response partner, you can reach us by calling or texting us at 407-984-7455 or email us at info@travelmediagroup.com.

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. Welcome to another edition of the Suite Spot, today we have a very special edition which is focused all around review response and with me today I have a very special guest, Mr. Patrick O’Brien, aka Mr. Review Response, he’s our product development manager at Travel Media Group and he runs our respond and resolve department. Patrick want to welcome you to the Suite Spot.

Patrick O’Brien: Thank you for having me.

Ryan Embree: Today, we’re going to do something I’m really excited about because Patrick, you and your team have been very hard at work, we’re going to get to some numbers here in a second, but we’re going to go through the top five sentiment tags that we find in reviews. So just to give our listeners a little bit of a background on the respond and resolve solution, how many reviews does your team respond to a month, right now?

Patrick O’Brien: Right now we’re probably averaging around 22,000 – 24,000 reviews for hotels each month. They vary from positive to negative across the board.

Ryan Embree: 22,000 – 24,000 that isn’t an incredible number. So you and your team are extremely busy. You also shared with me before this episode, year to date. So in 2019 we’re over 135,000 reviews that your team has responded to. So you guys really are the experts in hotel review response. Now when we talk about tags, can you kind of explain what I mean by a sentiment tags within a review?

Patrick O’Brien: When most people look at review response, the idea is I’ve gotta, you know, follow up with this customer who left me some type of feedback. But I think when you actually look at reviews, they’re probably some of the best business intelligence that you can get cause these are people letting you know in high volume what’s working at your hotel and what’s not working at your hotel, and ideally for what’s working at your hotel, what people who are coming to your market and specifically coming to your property are really excited about, what’s adding the value to that stay. So we’ve identified about 45 to 50 different elements and so we look for those in every review. That allows you to take really what is very subjective with a, you know, a review that’s been left and quantify it and break it down into what was that review really about? Were they talking positively about the cleanliness of the property, about the sleep quality at the property? Some of the amenities that I offer, did they like them, do they not like them? For me, the sentiment tags and the reporting also can help a hotel really dive into when they are looking to either justify or to make capital investment decisions. You can use that analysis and that data that’s collected in all of those reviews to let you know, if I’m going to spend $500,000 to make improvements at my property out of these options, what is it going to give me the best bang for my buck? It’s using the information like that and really being able to, when you have these reviews in mass, to be able to look at them in a very quantifiable, analytic way. And so that’s what we try to do with the sentiment analysis.

Ryan Embree: Awesome. So essentially to give a real life example, some of these guests will leave almost like a novel of a review and within that review they could be talking about maybe 10 to 15 different subjects about your hotel. Now if you’re just responding, a lot of those subjects could just get blended into that and you’re kind of just moving through it, you’re maybe not addressing every single subject that’s within that response while your team, what they do is they go in, they find those subjects, they tag them, and then they assign whether it’s positive, negative, or neutral. And then can roll all that up into some really cool data for, like you said, the actionable items. So you’re not just shooting in the dark when it comes to training, when it comes to marketing your hotel, and then when it comes to maybe taking some action in capital investments.

Patrick O’Brien: Sometimes when you’re reading a review and you’ve responded to five reviews in a row and five people were talking about loud guests there and then all of a sudden you’re like, “we’ve got this guest problem.” But when you look at that in aggregate, you’re like, “okay, you know this happens 2% of the time in my review, so maybe it’s not as as important or as big of a thing that I, that I was thinking that it may be.” Also, I think it helps to identify: cause one, one of the things that we try to do within our reporting as well is we’ll go in and now you can start to see like this specific item. I mean, it can be even as granular as the telephones in the room or the lighting in the room. This scores one and a half stars typically, you know, in the reviews, that’s the overall aggregate score, but when it’s in a review, that average review is maybe a three star. So if you have the ability to fix that item or those issues, then organically you’re going to increase your overall reputation because those items that were bringing your score down are no longer a factor. So it’s able to identify those and see really where that push is going to be in your reputation management as well.

Ryan Embree: Just to give our listeners an idea of how many tags your team have done, you were saying over 845,000?

Patrick O’Brien: 860,000

Ryan Embree: 860,000 times subjects that your team has identified. So it is exactly what you said, very granular and very time consuming. I mean this is, this is why hoteliers reach out to us for review response because this is the blueprint for your business moving forward, is this sort of feedback. So if it’s not treated properly or analyzed properly, then you could be missing out. So that’s why I’m super excited for today’s episode because what we’ve done, you got with your team and you’ve identified the top five sentiment tags. Now what we’re going to do to kind of to the set the agenda, we’re going to first talk about how your team approaches these and then what we’re going to do is we’re going to talk about if that tags a positive trend, you know what we would tell a hotelier essentially, alright how do we market this and if it’s a negative trend, what we might do to correct it. So let’s start with tag number one, which is value. Could you give us maybe like an example of, of what that might sound like?

Patrick O’Brien: At the end of the day what value is really looking at is did you meet the guest’s expectations? Nobody says, “I’m going to pay $150 for a room that I really feel like is worth $100, just because I’d rather spend the extra $50.” They’re looking at all the amenities and the room types and the images and reviews and all of those things. And they’re saying, “I feel like you know, this is what I should expect.” And then they get there and those expectations are either met or exceeded or they’re not. And that is really where value comes in when people are mentioning true value in saying like, “I don’t feel that this was worth the money that I paid for” or “I felt like this was such a great deal that I got” But again, it all comes down to expectations. And did you meet expectations? Did you not meet expectations? So, you know, we really try to highlight that in the response. So if it was positive, you know, we’re obviously always thanking the guests for their feedback and just kind of reinforcing that we are really excited that we were able to meet or exceed their expectations and we hope to continue to do that in the future with future stays and next time that they’re back in the area, etc. If it’s negative, I think at times there’s this idea that, you know, “Oh a property is broken” and it’s not, it’s just for that guest, for whatever reason, you did not meet their expectations and so we will apologize for that. If we didn’t get a lot of information on maybe why those expectations weren’t met, we typically ask the guest to reach out to the hotel directly, so they can get that feedback because you can’t fix what you don’t know is wrong. And you know, now with reviews being so prevalent, most guests don’t come up to the front desk and say, “here are the things that were wrong and I’d like to get them fixed.” They really don’t do that during stay and they don’t do it even when they’re checking out. And this is the only time that the hotel has the opportunity to try to fix those. So, you know, we do ask that the guests will reach out to the hotel and just give them more information and you know, and then just say, you know, we hope to improve your perception the next time that you come back. When you’re looking at, you know, as a hotel, what do I do with that information, specifically when you’re getting a lot of negative value tags and kind of feedback is you need to go back and look at your marketing materials, your website, social media accounts, and make sure, you know, like are your images up to date? You know, like these images were awesome 10 years ago when you just renovated the property and you haven’t done anything else. Well this person’s expecting the room to look like this and when the carpet’s a little frayed and the paint is a little faded, you’ve instantly, you know, underperformed to their expectations. So, you know, are your images up to date? Are there things that you need to do to kind of get that more aligned? Or do you just, you need to go back and do another renovation? Really looking at those materials so that when this person’s making that buying decision in their head that they’re getting a good idea of what they’re going to walk into.

Ryan Embree: And I think this is a very powerful tag because if you’re seeing a trend, a negative trend on value, guests for some reason, do not think that your hotel is a good value that keeps coming up. What you can do then is check the other tags and see what is negative and what people are essentially not liking about your property and then you can attach it to value. So I think this being the number one tag I think is spot on. The other thing I’ll say about value, it’s obviously we want to always provide value for our guests and if we’re seeing that positive trend in value, that might be an opportunity for a hotelier to look at and say, “Hey, you know, everyone thinks this, this is a value maybe I can raise my prices a little bit.” You start to see that ROI, you start to see ADR go up a little bit. So this tag is very, very powerful. So not surprised it is number one as far as the sentiment tags that your team’s finding. Let’s move to number 2, cleanliness and pest. Can you talk a little bit about how your team would approach a response when that tag is involved?

Patrick O’Brien: Specifically with pest, it is very important: so one of the things we will never do in a response if somebody indicated, you know, “Hey, I had an issue with bed bugs.” We’re never going, in our response, we’re never going to specifically mention bedbugs and that centers around, you know, search engine optimization and we don’t want to add more weight to somebody who is searching for bedbugs at this hotel and that coming up.

Ryan Embree: That’s a great point.

Patrick O’Brien: We’ll try to use, you know, either pest or uninvited guests, you need to be careful with uninvited guests cause you know, mentioning we’re sorry you had uninvited guests in your bed. Doesn’t sound right in a response. But you know what we’ll try to use those terms that people aren’t necessarily going to be searching for quite as frequently, but still address the problem. Ideally, if there was a concern specifically around bedbugs at the property, the hotel would have already heard about it before the review came out and hopefully they have already taken measures to inspect that room and go through their process. If they haven’t, there’s also – we see this a lot – where somebody had a bad experience and, you know, for whatever reason – and it could have been a host of things – but then they’re like, “Oh and I got bedbugs too.”

Ryan Embree: Right. Just the cherry on top of a bad stay.

Patrick O’Brien: And they didn’t really, and you know, the, the hotel goes there and there’s no evidence of bedbugs. So, if the review comes from a guest who’s maybe not identifiable, they’ve got a screen name, we always then at that point we’ll ask the guests to follow up with us directly so we can further investigate the information, identify the room so we can make sure that it isn’t an issue. If the hotel wasn’t aware about it and they haven’t heard other guests complain about it, we also try to highlight that in the response. And just say you know, “we haven’t heard any other concerns about this, so you know, we really need you to reach out to us and help us make sure that everything has been taken care of.” If the hotel has been made aware of it, you know, they still got the review. They may have already gone through a process where, you know, they had exterminators come out, check the room and stuff like that and they’ll usually give us that information. So we will provide that information in the response, as well and just say, “you know, hey we, you know, we had our pest control team come out. They’ve cleaned the room head to toe, they didn’t find any evidence of it. We apologize. You know, we’d be happy to talk to you more about this issue.” But that also lets potential guests that are reading that know like, “Hey, this has been checked out and we’re good, likeI’m not gonna go there and have some issue.”

Ryan Embree: And to really hone in on that fact, I think that’s so important that your team does that because, you know, we tell hoteliers all the time, you know, if I’m writing a negative review and it has to do with bed bugs or cleanliness or something like that, I am writing that review once and I’m seeing that response once and then I’m moving on with my life. But you probably have maybe 10, 20, 30 potential guests that are gonna read that review. So giving them the peace of mind that preventative measures have been taken and putting that step-by-step is absolutely critical to future guests potentially making that booking decision with you or with your competition. So I love that your team provides those preventative measures in there because it’s so important for travelers that are reading that review.

Patrick O’Brien: Yeah, and I say, you know, you may not win back that guest – hopefully you will, hopefully you’ll get them to give you a second chance – you may not win that guest back, but you are at least showing other potential guests how you would treat them and how you would handle their concerns if they were to have that same type of thing. Then that lets them make a better purchasing decision and ultimately helps set their expectations for the stay they’re going to have.

Ryan Embree: Yeah, and that’s ultimately what these reviews are for, right? It’s not, we don’t read reviews to hear and be empathetic of the people that came before us were reading those reviews because we want to know what’s going to happen when we stay there. So that, that’s a very good point, and I know you have on here when we talk about, you know, positive, there’s no really positive to pest, but cleanliness. If we are getting positive trends with cleanliness, that’s always something that we can share on social media accounts, we can highlight those reviews, you know, you can never really have too many good reviews about cleanliness cause it’s not a going above and beyond anymore in the hotel industry, it’s a standard and an expectation for guests.

Patrick O’Brien: Yeah, and I think sometimes even within that you may get specific housekeeping individuals that are highlighted and I think those are always great opportunities if you can, take a picture of that housekeeper post it on Facebook along with that review and really kind of highlight them so people get a better understanding of your property. And again, if it’s bad, if it’s just cleanliness and again – not just bedbugs, it could be dust, it could be trash left in the room, etc – hopefully you can start tagging that to maybe a specific room and then there’s just an issue with that room or you may be able to tag that with specific individuals and start to say like, “I’ve got to do some retraining with my housekeeping staff and make sure that they’re, you know, dotting all the i’s and crossing all the t’s when, when they are turning over those rooms so that we can do that.” We had a hotel that – it was a good property, good value, had a lot going on for it – just got crushed on cleanliness and brought all of their review scores down overall. They ended up – and this was this is kind of like the extreme side – they ended up getting rid of their entire housekeeping team and rehired. And it was immediate, the day that that happened, the reviews changed. It’s not always the direction you want to go, but it just kind of shows an extreme there of trying to identify and fix the problem.

Ryan Embree: Yeah, but it shows the power of identifying those issues and making sure that it didn’t turn into something that was going to hurt the business. And what these tags do is we don’t just look at them over one course of time, we look at it over the course of an entire year or a quarter or months. So, right as you start to see that trend go negative with cleanliness, you know, that’s when you make that decision or that call to go, “Alright, we need to retrain now because we’re seeing this slide.” So let’s move on to tag number 3, and that’s location. It’s very hard to change your location, but talk to us a little bit about when travelers are mentioning your location, how does your team approach it?

Patrick O’Brien: There can be a lot of things that go along with this, I mean sometimes it’s just like, “Wow, the location was amazing. Everything was right around there and they had these things to offer.” And I think when you’re hearing that and you’re seeing that a lot, you definitely want to use that in your marketing materials, you know, on your website and make sure, you know, everybody knows all of these great things that are around. Sometimes it may be safety. We see with some of our, you know, downtown hotels, guests want to be downtown in the thick of everything, but being downtown also brings up some safety issues that go along with that, like is my car parked safe and stuff like that. So when it’s those types of items, you know, do you have proper lighting outside? Do you have secure parking? Are you doing things at that point to make the guests feel safe? And if you are, then every time somebody mentions like, “Oh, you know, there was a lot going on right around the property and I didn’t necessarily feel safe.” Then in the response, those items should be highlighted, you know, we have a security guard who’s on premise 24 hours a day, our outside entryways are only accessible by key card and you know, and doing those things, again, it’s to let future guests know that “Hey this is the expectation, this is what you’re walking into.” And if you’re not doing those things, then you start to see this, then you know, you can start to identify where you’re gonna need to make investments in what you’re going to need to do because the end of the day you can’t change the location, but you can change the feeling of security that someone gets. The other item that may be negative on location is just like, “Hey, you know, the hotel was great, but there’s nothing around there.” If that’s the case, hopefully there are, you know, there are some restaurants, there are some things to do, and then it is okay, you know, we need to come together as a hotel and determine like, “Here are some of the really great things that somebody can do, whether that’s a car ride or an Uber away or something they could walk to or whatever.” And then again, highlighting that information, you know, on your website, in social media, maybe even connecting with those businesses via social media, do some types of cross promotion but also make sure that your front desk knows about all of those. You know, when, sometimes you may have, you don’t have a full time concierge, but you know, maybe you have a sheet that they can go through or at least be aware cause there’s nothing worse as a guest – like you’re in this town, you know, brand new and you’re asking like, “Where are some good places to to go out to eat?” And they’re like, “I don’t know. You can go down the road maybe 10 or 15 minutes and you may find a couple of things.” You know what I want a recommendation, I want you to say, you know, “What are you interested in? Well, here’s a great, you know, seafood restaurant, or here’s a great Italian restaurant, this is very family friendly or whatever.” So you know, it is, there’s that training opportunity there, when that’s kind of the concern that you see around location.

Ryan Embree: I think this is a great opportunity to mention to the extensive research and background information that you have on every single one of our partners. So when you first onboard, you know, a new hotel to our respond and resolve program, you’re reaching out for that information, right? It’s not just put on them, you know, to add that to the reviews. No, we’re going to proactively reach out and we’re going to ask about those, maybe safety features, we’re going to ask about those things in the area, so that when these particular reviews come across, we’ve got some ammo in our corner that your team can essentially say, “Alright, this is how I’m gonna respond because they mentioned x, y, and Z. Correct? Awesome. So moving on to tag number 4, very important when we talk about hotels, sleep quality, how does your team kind of approach that and what exactly are you looking for when you tag sleep quality in a review?

Patrick O’Brien: It is a very important tag because at the end of the day they want to get a good night’s sleep. One of the biggest things though to know is that when you’re talking about beds and mattresses and there’s preference styles and you’re not going to be able to satisfy every guest. We’ve got a couple properties that actually have two types of mattresses and you can let them know and they’ll switch it out. Again, that’s kind of that extreme side of what your preferences, but you know, when we are responding, if somebody is like, “Oh, you know, the mattress was really hard and I couldn’t get a good night’s sleep and I woke up.” It’s not that the mattress was wrong, it’s just that it wasn’t their preference and we try to highlight that, you know, we do apologize that our mattresses weren’t to your preference. We hope that you were still able to get a good night’s sleep. You know, sometimes it may be too soft, sometimes you know, people are indicating, you know, the mattresses were dipping, you know, in the middle, and it was very uncomfortable. When you start to identify those, maybe you start to look at phasing out some of those mattresses and so, you know, sometimes it may be working with the guest within the response to try to identify the room that they were staying in so that we can check it and make sure like, do I need to replace this one specific mattress? Is there something going around? Can I flip it? You know, what can I do to fix that issue. But again, it is really important to look at it as a matter of preference versus it’s broken or, you know, it’s not good, because it’s good that’s gonna vary for every guest. The other issue that we can get in there, you know, around sleep quality, sometimes can be outside noise or it could be other guests. We try to work at that point to remind people, you know, within the response that they can always contact the front desk. You know, they’re there 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So, you know, contact them, when something like that is going on. So they may be able to try to help out with that, specifically if it’s loud guests, you know, they can come and calm them down or kick them out or whatever may need to happen at that point. You know, if it’s road noise, there may not be as much you can do for that until you start looking at, you know, do I get new windows or we have some properties that have created, sleep well packages and they’ve got earplugs, you know, in there. And not everybody you know, loves that, but at least it shows and you can reference that in the response that, you know, we’re trying – we realize that there’s a highway by us and you love the highway being by us because the location’s great for your trip, but you don’t love the highway by us because it’s a little bit louder when you’re sleeping so we’ve got these earplugs to help you get a good night’s sleep. Or maybe you invest in some noise machines and white noise and stuff like that. But it is trying to identify those and is this problem epidemic of the whole property or is it, you know, to a specific room or area. We’ll have, sometimes people are like, “I was right by the pool and the pool is open, was open late, you know, at 11 o’clock and kids are playing and it was hard to get to sleep.” Do you start looking at pool hours? Or letting people know if this isn’t something you’d prefer, we have other rooms available as well that aren’t in that area.

Ryan Embree: That’s something that I think is key that your team does such a good job of is explaining policies through a review response. Again, for those guests or travelers that could be potentially staying there in the future. So if you say something like it was 10:00 PM and kids were out by the pool and your pool does close at 11:00 PM that is something that you guys mention in the review response because again, you’re explaining that to that next traveler that says, “Okay, the pool is going to be open at this time.” Think about this, if you’re a hotel out there and you did have a broken bed or one of the beds just needed to be replaced, you could potentially have a guest come into that room, leave, another guest check-in, and maybe four or five check-ins go to that same room and all have the same review about the sleep quality and if those guests leave one star reviews on your TripAdvisor, that is going to do so much damage. So review response like this can help you identify that and say, “Alright, after the first time that guest checks out, now all of a sudden we’ve implemented something, maybe shut that room down so it doesn’t snowball into maybe four or five one star reviews.” You just get that one negative review, so another way that review response and this solution can kind of help you. One Room, can really just dismantle the…

Patrick O’Brien: Yeah, people will get in and think like, “Oh, all of the beds are terrible.” And the truth of the matter is you may have just – you know, the, the beds could be, you know, a year old – and one has just is not holding up. You know, we typically do try to go back in and say, please contact us so that we can explore this, because this isn’t typical of a stay at our property. And that’s another, I think important thing, especially when it comes to like preference items is, you know, letting them know that your experience wasn’t typical and we certainly apologize for that. We will work to make sure that that doesn’t happen again for future guests.

Ryan Embree: I love that, and again, with the scope and sheer number of reviews that you guys are going through a day, a month for you guys to take the time to do that review I think is almost next level. Let’s get to our final tag, breakfast. Talk to me a little bit about when breakfast is mentioned, cause I’m sure it’s brought up a lot in these reviews.

Patrick O’Brien: Breakfast is probably one of the biggest amenities that travelers are looking for. They love the convenience. I think they love the idea that, like I’m already paying for a place to stay and I’m getting a free breakfast, and again, that goes towards value. This is a little bit similar to sleep quality where it’s a preference type of thing. You know, sometimes it may be the hotel doesn’t offer breakfast and they were upset about that and you start identifying that enough, it may be, “Hey, we need to look at adding a breakfast” and you know, are we going to spend – if I spent $6 per guest to add a breakfast and that’s a pretty big expense – but am I going to be able to increase conversions, potentially, increase my room rate and be able to make that up very quickly. That can be a really interesting, you know, item to take on. If I’m offering a breakfast, sometimes it may be around the selection of items they didn’t care for, sometimes it may be around the service of breakfast, like, you know, “They came and they – it wasn’t adequately stocked or restocked.” And then sometimes it may be around breakfast hours, you know, and we see that a lot, you know, people like to sleep in and they’re like, “I was super excited about the breakfast and it closed at 9am and like it’s the weekend who gets up at nine.”

Ryan Embree: Again, another opportunity there to explain your policies, right? Talk about breakfast is from this time to this time so that those guests coming in know when that is.

Patrick O’Brien: And not just in the review response, but also if you’re starting to see that, make sure that that then becomes part of the check in process with your front desk to adequately explain that. So you take out that opportunity for a missed expectation there. If it’s really around like the quality of food or the items available. You know, one of the things we always try to do is just, you know, again – we really apologize that our complimentary breakfast and – sometimes I try to throw that in there to remind people that you weren’t necessarily paying for this, but – that complimentary breakfast didn’t meet all your preferences, but we hope that you still found some items to help you get a good start to your day. Framing it that this individual didn’t love everything we had to offer, but it’s not bad, it’s not a terrible breakfast, it just wasn’t right for this person. And you know, sometimes people may be identifying, you know, like the breakfast is offered at the hotels are very carb-heavy and there’s pancakes and waffles and bagels and cereal and not a lot of fresh fruit, and fresh fruit can obviously be more expensive. But again, that starts to come down to what would happen if I, you know, spent $75 a day on fresh fruit. You know, would that be enough to compliment everybody who’s staying at the property and could I all of the sudden, you know, maybe even again, increase my rates slightly and, or you know, would I be getting three or four more room nights, you know, a night because now, you know, my breakfast is the best in the market or in my area. So it’s things like that to start looking at and identifying, but again, it is very important with breakfast that, if you’re offering breakfast, your breakfast isn’t terrible or bad, it just may not be to the preference of that traveler. And if it’s not to the preference of a lot of travelers, then that comes down to identifying how you’re describing or what images you’re showing of your breakfasts. Are they accurate? Because that expectation at some point, wasn’t met.

Ryan Embree: And I think this is a really good example of a tag that, you know, you’re talking about the ROI of, you know, adding fruit to a breakfast, right? Like that might be hard to track, but it’s kind of that example that you talked about at the very beginning of this episode. If breakfast is something that’s bringing down your review score overall, maybe from, “I left the three star review, it would have been five star review, if this breakfast was a little better.” Now all of a sudden you add those things. How many more bookings are you now getting from other potential travelers doing research? Because that review score was brought up because you’re spending a little bit more extra money. These are the types of questions, this is the type of data that we help hoteliers analyze, that we uncover for them within these reviews, because it’s a lot of data, it’s a lot of feedback. I’m sure you know that with just the sheer number of reviews that you guys are responding to. So any closing comments before we wrap up?

Patrick O’Brien: Review response for hoteliers – I think a lot of times becomes one more thing I have to do and it’s really unfortunate sometimes when you’ll see like somebody went out and they left a negative review or they left a positive review and you know, and it was fairly detailed and it was just the review response is, “Hey, we’re sorry you didn’t enjoy your stay. We hope we can do better next time.” If you’ve got all of this information about your property, do something with it. And that was, before we ever started the review response program, the sentiment and the tagging and the analytics that came behind it was really at the forefront of what this program was going to be. Yes, we are taking a kind of a function or a service off of your plate by responding to reviews, but what we’re trying to do is help you make your hotel better with the analytics, because you’re not going to get better detailed information about your property then the online reviews, because it’s not just looking at, you know, a spreadsheet of my mattresses are supposed to last five years and we’re at four and a half years, so we’re going to – it’s people specifically telling you what’s working and what’s not working at your property. And not only just anybody telling you that, but the people who are coming to your market, the people who were choosing your property over something else. So it gives you that opportunity to really direct your marketing efforts, it gives you the ability to direct your operational efforts, and gives you the knowledge to make the best decisions so you’re not just throwing money trying to determine, “Hey, things aren’t working right now.” Like, what is going to work or, you know, we’re down in our occupancy so I need to lower the rate to try to get more people, it may not be just, you know, strictly on rate. Again, we’re looking at 50 different elements in every review. So there’s a lot of lot of things that people are talking about and using that information to guide your business, so that you’re not just trying to operate in the dark. I think really important and I think it is one of the most powerful things that as a business owner, you can get your hands around.

Ryan Embree: When you were talking about, you know, this data. It’s not, we’re not just looking at the spreadsheets of the life of a mattress or something like that and we’re also not looking just at a concentrated group like you might get from the brand surveys, right? So it’s not just Marriott members or just Choice members. No, this is the entire audience, OTAs, Google, TripAdvisor, every single person that leaves a review. That’s where this data coming from and I think it’s important to get that entire scope. Well, Patrick, thank you so much. Congratulations to you and your team. Keep up the great work. If you’re interested in joining our respond and resolve solution, please feel free to contact us. I’m sure Patrick and his team would love to respond to some more reviews so we can keep those numbers going up. You can reach out to us at (407) 984 7455. Again, this is Ryan Embree. Thank you for listening to another episode of the Suite Spot. 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 Anne Sandoval with cover art by Barry Gordon. I’m your host Ryan Embree and we hope you enjoyed your stay.