Join Suite Spot Host, Ryan Embree, as he and Chief Technology Officer,Jason Lee, break down the insights and data collected in the 2nd edition of our TMG Summer Guest Sentiment Report on the podcast. This episode contains valuable information for hoteliers looking to make better operational and strategic decisions for their hotels as the end of the year approaches while closing out the year strong.

Ryan Embree:
This is your host, Ryan Embree here, coming from the content creation studio in Maitland, Florida at the headquarters of Travel Media Group. Got another great episode for you today with a very special guest, but a guest that has been with us a lot of times on these episode. Jason Lee, Chief Technology Officer at Travel Media Group. Jason, thanks again for joining the Suite Spot.

Jason Lee:
All right, thanks for having me, Ryan.

Ryan Embree:
Yeah, and this has become a little bit of a tradition here with these episodes that we’re doing. We’re gonna talk about summer guest sentiment. Now, for those listeners or viewers, if you’re watching us on YouTube here, give us a little background about guest sentiment, how we’re pulling it and what the trends and insights we’re gonna be talking about today.

Jason Lee:
Okay, so here at Travel Media Group, we process all reviews received by hotels in the United States. So meaning we, we bring them into our system. We use natural language processing to kind of pull out specific keywords, and then we use that same kind of processing in an AI that actually decides whether this is positive or negative. So taking all of that information and sort of splicing it and dicing it. But then we call it sentence chunks, but it’s looking at little chunks of sentences that basically would determine whether or not those key words are positive or negative. So that’s where all of this comes from. So it, so you could have, in one single review, you could have five or six sentiment points, and you know, that review could be rated positively, but the actual language could have positive and negative pieces to it. So we do not take rating into account. It is all based on the actual language in the review.

Ryan Embree:
Well, that’s important because we’ve talked about before a four or five star rating could still have some negative elements to it. Right? Absolutely. You know, everything was great in my stay, but you know, I felt like the parking was a little expensive, or there might be some positive sentiment with the negative reviews where, you know, everything seemed to go wrong, except the staff was just super nice and friendly the entire time. So that’s why it’s so important to kind of break down these patterns and trends. And when he says every single review, we’re talking big numbers, 1.6 million reviews, that is 100,000 more than we got when we did this in the spring, which is expected. Summer still continues to be our busiest travel season, but within that 1.6 million reviews, over 7 million pieces of guest sentiment. So subjects, topics, elements of a review that people are talking about having sentiment towards, that’s all broken down in these insights and data.

Jason Lee:
Yeah, we use the kind of bigger categories. So the main categories we have are the room, the service experience, and the facility experience. So we use those sort of as the bigger category, and then we have a bunch of tags and aspects inside of each one of those categories.

Ryan Embree:
Yeah. And what we’re gonna do today on this episode, Jason, is we’re gonna give some of our key takeaways and insights to all of this data, right? Me and you, we absolutely love this data. We could probably spend hours talking about it, dissecting it and putting it, you know, into categories. But we’re just gonna have five key takeaways today. We’re gonna express, you know, maybe why that is. Seasonality has a lot to do with it, right? I mean, again, busy season. This is when our hotels get the most stressed, as far as, you know, occupancy coming in and could uncover, we’ve talked about it before, could uncover some patterns and trends that might have been issues in the slower season, but now have become bigger problems in the summer. So we’re gonna go ahead and start here. We’re gonna start talking about staff, and we actually talked about this in the spring, and we did, this is our second edition of the T M G Guest Summer Sentiment Report, and last summer staff was mentioned negatively. 33% of the time, that is actually down to 15%. Which I thought was fascinating because I’m still hearing, you know, at the hospitality show that we attended hoteliers, that we talked to, staffing is still an issue. We’re we still have a staffing shortage in our industry, but yet the negative sentiment around it is actually decreasing. What are your thoughts on that? Where do you think that’s coming from?

Jason Lee:
Yeah, I think it’s really interesting and I, I think, you know, you and I were talking about this a little bit before the podcast, but I think technology does play a part in that, and where, where we might not be having as many staff interactions as a guest. So there’s, there could be less, so less to, to have an issue with. But I also think that a lot of, especially operators that are looking at this data, there’s so much available information, whether it’s this sentiment data or it’s data from your brand through surveys where you’re starting to look at like, what are the common fail points and how can we overcome them before our busy season?

Ryan Embree:
Yeah, that’s important, right? Because it’s not just about identifying the problems, it’s actually having solutions for them. And that’s something at Travel Media Group, we help provide not only the insights, but also the solutions to help fix those things. But you’re right, with the guest experience, now, you could go mobilely, check in, you could go to your room, stay in your room. If you don’t call down for service, which we’ve talked about is a big change in the guest experience now having to call down for service. If you don’t have to call down for service, you check out the next day. Mobilely, you could go your entire stay without interacting at all with the staff. Yeah, so maybe that’s not even an element that’s included in your review. So unless there’s something that is physically wrong with the room, physically wrong with your stay FnB, you know, there’s so many other elements of the experience. Staff might not be something that you include because you didn’t have that interaction that you used to. And another thing is outsourcing, right? This staffing shortage is nothing new to our industry. We’ve been battling it for now, almost a year and a half. And hotels that I’ve talked to on this podcast and our TMG Hospitality Trailblazer Series has said that they have had to evolve and adapt to be more efficient at their hotels. And one of the things that they’re doing, and we have seen on our end is they’re outsourcing things like review response, where they might have been behind a computer responding to reviews for a couple hours, now they’re outsourcing it to vendors like Travel Media Group so that their staff can be more efficient in their role, get in front of their guests, and potentially that’s having an impact on the guest experience.

Jason Lee:
Yeah, I totally agree. If you look at, you know, hours in a day and all of the things that a GM is faced with, it can be overwhelming. And, and so a lot of times the majority of those are not completely guest facing. So these are other items and things that are happening that affect the guest maybe at some point. But these are a bunch of things that are happening in the day of a life of a general manager or, or even an AGM where getting to these other things becomes either past an eight hour day or it becomes interference space. So now I’m interfering with stuff that I could be doing that would be guest facing and could make a difference.

Ryan Embree:
Yeah, absolutely. We did a survey earlier in 2023, we had 98% of the hoteliers that we’re working with, with review response solution that said that they have more time now at the property not responding to reviews. And they’re using that in a capacity of different ways, checking rooms, interacting with guests, training staff. A well-trained staff also has a huge impact on the guest experience. If you’re only able to give so much time and training to a new staff member, it could take them a minute to get ramped up in order to be that superstar employee that you’re expecting and meeting those expectations to your guests. So having the ability to train your staff and give them more hours in a day is exactly one of those things that has direct correlation with your reputation.

Jason Lee:
I think it’s interesting, you know, and outsourcing is nothing new. I mean, we’ve been doing this for a long time. I mean, I don’t know very many hotels that do their own pool maintenance, that do things that are really specific, you know, mix their own chemicals. Or, you know, landscaping. They’re not doing any landscaping. There are a lot of companies that outsource, valet and even food and beverage and certainly catering. This isn’t new, you know, and I think it’s really more about like, you know, what is, what is the capacity of your hotel? Where are the revenue and the profit centers? But then also, how much time do I have? And what is my expertise? Am I an expert in all of these things and where could I, you know, have somebody come help me out? And so, and we love doing that at Travel Media Group, but we also realize that we’re part of, hopefully a core of vendors that are doing things that really positively impact the guest and positively impact the operation of the hotel.

Ryan Embree:
Yeah. The evolution, the role of your employees has certainly changed over the last couple years, not to say a decade ago, right? Where things like social media, even online feedback, being able to have the ability to respond, that was not something that hoteliers were doing a couple decades ago. And now all of a sudden you’re adding it to a job responsibility instead of eliminating other things. So it’s certainly evolving. It’s certainly a process and a transition. Like I said, we’ve had more interest than ever of being like, I’m trying to give time back to my employees. How do I do that review response? And that task is one way certainly to do that. Moving on to cleanliness. This was the number four talked about topic. Cleanliness is always gonna be a part. Prior to the pandemic people were still talking about cleanliness. In this specific season, it was mentioned over 530,000 times. So cleanliness has to do with the guest experience. It’s a part of it. I think when the pandemic happened, people elevated that as a priority because it had correlation to do with health and safety. But being that it’s still the number four, a top five sentiment topic, it’s still top of mind for guests coming into a property. And now they might have higher expectations.

Jason Lee:
No, absolutely. And everybody wants a clean room. Nobody wants to come into something that’s dirty. But I think, and hopefully the hotels listening to this can relate to this is, is that I remember, you know, going from my kind of shoulder seasons into the peak season, and there were rooms that I had that I hadn’t rented for a minute that had dusty stuff, and you know, yet the toilet hadn’t been flushed in a minute. Stuff like that is when your occupancy reaches a hundred percent mark or, or it starts to approach that you are utilizing your entire facility at a degree that you probably weren’t before. So, so cleanliness becomes an issue on all fronts. It’s walkways, it’s common, you know, so those common areas, but it’s lobby elevators and obviously the room. So, you know, I, I don’t think this will probably be something we’ll be talking about years and years and years in the future. Cleanliness will always be an issue.

Ryan Embree:
Well, we’ve talked about very polarizing, right? It’s, there’s no mid clean, there’s no like kind of yellow like clean. It’s either it was clean or unclean there. And you make a really important point that I always talk about. ’cause I always think about cleanliness and I think about the room automatically, but there are so many elements of a hotel and a guest experience that they uncover. They could be talking about the cleanliness of your lobby, like you mentioned. Amenities, like the pool gym, right. That is definitely a place that needs to be on top of. As far as cleanliness goes. So there is certainly a wider net cast when it comes to cleanliness of pitfalls there. So, you know, making sure you’re on top of it, especially in these summer seasons.

Jason Lee:
Cleanliness is, is visual. And I think smell is a big part of it too. So here’s a combination of stuff, but if you’re in a high-rise hotel, right? And your room is spotless, smells great, but the windows are dirty. I mean, it’s, it’s just one of those things, right. You know, and I think that’s what you have to take into account when you look at all of these pieces. And, and I think it’s, it’s daunting. It’s an, it’s a daunting task for any hotelier to keep all of these things clean.

Ryan Embree:
It’s important to look for these trends, right? Because they could manifest it being a housekeeper that cleans a certain way or but forgets to do one part of their job. And if that continues to happen, it’s not recognized and essentially fixed, then you’re gonna continue to see that and could have some really permanent damage on your reputation to build back up. So fascinating, always keep an eye, obviously on cleanliness as we know it’s gonna be talked about topic in your guest reviews, no matter where you’re at. Let’s switch, gears to where online review sites are left. And we’re gonna talk about TripAdvisor. So, 61% of the sentiment on TripAdvisor left is positive, and that’s better than some of the OTAs and Google reviews. This is, this is great because TripAdvisor continues to be a trustworthy place because you have character limits. It’s a very credible source. But you’ve got an asterisk to this little piece of insight and data.

Jason Lee:
Yeah, I do. And I think TripAdvisor has been this long standing standard of information and where guests, like you said, guests trust it because there is a character limit. Because you have to, you know, the guest has to write credible information. Yeah. So if we look at all the sentiment that we received for TripAdvisor comes in, just above 13%. You compare that to 32% at Booking.com, which by the way had the lowest at 47% positive sentiment. Booking.com also has a dual question. They have the what do you like and what didn’t you like? Ah, so if you looked at scores, if you went back and looked at just the scores, the scores were not that different between Booking.com, the actual rating, the five point and ten point rating, they weren’t that different between the two of them. But because there’s more sentiment data that comes from Booking.com, because almost every review contains a negative element. So that is very, it’s, it’s very different. It’s interesting. It’s an interesting, you know, level of data. So when you look at this kind of thing, it’s like, is this negatively impacting guests on Booking.com because you have 47% positive sentiment? I think, no, I think, you know, I think it, it’s painting a clear picture.Yeah. Where, whereas with TripAdvisor, and this is like, so it’s 13, it’s 13.9% is actually what the stat was. It’s just actually under 9% of total reviews. So this is a crazy place for TripAdvisor to be, in my opinion. Yes. Where, where you used to be a major percentage of review contribution, and now you’re seeing big hotels that have months with no reviews. And so I’m not sure where all this is gonna land, but something is gonna have to change in terms of the quantity because, you know, while the sentiment is so positive, my worry is that at some point there’s not gonna be enough relevant reviews for, for a guest to go there and say, okay, this is, I’m gonna continue coming here and, and looking at this information. Yeah.

Ryan Embree:
And the hotels that are prioritizing TripAdvisor and making it as strategy, I mean, any hotel on this podcast, Google your property. Yeah. And you’ll see your website and right underneath it on that first page is going to be TripAdvisor. It is still a major source of information for your property. And we said that this was a huge issue during the pandemic of relevancy because of, you know, they just didn’t know how they guest experience was at that time. That is continuing to follow us. But it is the hotels that have a strategy to get more reviews, the quantity, increase the quantity of reviews on TripAdvisor that are gonna see some dividends there. And we, we actually have a solution that helps get some more positive feedback to places like TripAdvisor and Google. But it is absolutely fascinating. ’cause something’s gotta happen here with this volume of reviews that TripAdvisor is seeing. But still, I, I feel like it is still a very credible and trustworthy source right now for online travel, just based on its position when you search and where travelers are going. Absolutely. And

Jason Lee:
It’s still number one. Yes, yes. Yeah. But I, but I think this is where, again, reputation data. So we look at all the sentiment, we look at, we kind of really dig in to give the hotelier the best view. But if you look at it in another way, what is the guest experiencing? And so the guest is experiencing lifetime scores in all of these categories. So I’m experiencing a lifetime score on TripAdvisor, a lifetime score on Google and booking.com, Expedia, et cetera. So what does that tell me about the current state of this hotel. What does that, what is a lifetime score, which could be 10 or 15 years of reviews? So what does that tell me about this hotel today? And I think, I think guests struggle, honestly. You know, I think the, and, and I think it’s still a struggle because we, we have decided as an industry that we’re gonna keep lifetime scores. This is the, this is me platforming on this. ’cause it, it drives me crazy because I feel like it’s does a disservice to the hotel and the guests to, to only see this data. And there is so inside of our platform, I look at this data in all different ways. And I’m sure a lot of people listening to this are looking at this data weekly or daily either. Yeah. The guests don’t have that luxury. They can’t see any of this. Yeah. So they are just stuck with the most immediate information, which is your lifetime score and whatever data is on that first page of reviews. And this is just a crazy space in terms of like trying to determine value 4.5 or 4.7 that you have in a lifetime score. Your last 12 months could be higher than that, or it could be much lower than that. Right. But that is where I think the guest has to look and go, you know, how do I determine value? How do I determine this? And, and we as hoteliers and, and a industry or a company that services this industry, I know, I know we didn’t plan on talking about this today, Ryan, but I’m gonna, I’m platforming right now I feel really strongly about the fact that we’re, we have enough data now, there’s enough data o this, this huge amount of time of data, the only relevant data to a guest. And really the only relevant data to us should be the stuff that’s happening right now, guest experience that happened last night, a guest experience that happened last week. And it should be, this is the stuff that’s actionable. This is the stuff that is meaningful.

Ryan Embree:
So the, we just started a new sweet spot spotlight series, which I will go ahead and tease our next episode. I just spoke with Ashish Verma at the chat while New York. And one of the que we were talking e exactly about this. And I was talking about you have a historic reputation. So when people hear the word the chat while New York, they have this idea of what it is. But he was talking about how he wants to stay relevant today. So it’s about the feedback that’s online right now, that guests that he’s been impacting recently. Because you’re never gonna change that historic legacy reputation. Right. But he focuses on, and, and it could be easy to, and a lot of hotels do that. They say, Hey, we talk to hotels. They go, I’m a 4.5 on TripAdvisor. I’m good. I I’m ranked up here. We go to their TripAdvisor page. In the last three or four reviews have just been scathing. They’ve been one star reviews. And when we bring the that to them, that they’re kind of surprised and we kind of ask, don’t you think this is having an impact right now on your occupancy? And it kind of clicks. So hotels need to really start looking at, at a fresh way of looking at their feedback, just exactly like you’re saying, because that legacy reputation is only gonna take you so far. And we’re looking more and more into the details of tonight’s stay. And I think the pandemic really changed that. Yeah. Because they wanted to know how things were at the hotel at a moment’s notice. Not over the course of time, because they can say, well, you know what? There was a review here, but it might’ve been this. I, I, I’ll, I’ll, kind of kick this to the side. And this was a one-off. No, they want to know what it’s gonna be like today. It’s a fascinating subject. I’m glad we we landed on it, but Yeah, I I’m

Jason Lee:
Gonna say one more thing. Yeah. And then, and then we can close this up. We can talk about the next, the next subject. Yeah. But the last thing I’ll say is that I think this speaks to a guest’s desire to find relevance, but it’s not just a guest. Think about everything you do. A lot of it is about trying to understand what’s happening right now. So, and there is an absolute correlation between where reputation data is and how much it informs a guest and how many guests are now using social media sites like Facebook, like Instagram, even LinkedIn and Twitter. But they are using these sites to determine what’s happening now. And, and I think that’s just, again, this avoid in information.

Ryan Embree:
Yeah. You’re absolutely right. If they see a negative review and then find their way onto your Facebook page and you haven’t posted in a year. Yeah. And that review talks about you not caring about the guests. What’s that impression there, right. Of being like, well, they don’t care enough about to post on their business page. How are they gonna be a good host to me? Yeah. Quick example there. But yeah, we could go, that’s a whole nother episode. Yes. Yes. We could talk about, let’s switch to the pool. This one was interesting, positive sentiment around the topic of the pool. Summertime last year was 66% down to 43%. Only thing I can think of is we had a crazy summer. Yeah. As far as travel goes, maybe those travelers that over the last couple of years were enjoying those staycations and having the pool all to themselves, now all of a sudden they’re coming there, things are a little bit more crowded and they’re thinking, where’s my pool chairs to, to myself. But yeah, that’s a significant decrease. Definitely. And positive sentiment topic. It could

Jason Lee:
Be the return, like you said, it could be the return of normal travel from revenge travel where it’s like, I’m coming out of hibernation and I’m just excited to be at a pool last year. Right. You know, I’m just excited to be out and in the sun and enjoying myself. Yeah. We were, we were all there. And so I might not be scrutinizing the way I am now. And, and it’s a great point. We actually see that more, more and more where, where people are complaining about not getting a chair at the pool, not being able to, you know, the prices or not being able to get service at a pool. Yeah. So we’re seeing that a lot,

Ryan Embree:
A lot of elements to that. It’s just interesting now we’re getting in that I think we were just happy to be there. Phase was last year and now everyone’s coming in and the expectation has kind of changed and we gotta get used to being in, in big crowds again and having these, having our hotels a hundred percent occupied and, and what that was like. So fairly That has something to do with it as well. You know, the margins are thin there. Yeah. If one thing might be off, now all of a sudden you’ve got that rate stuck in your head at all times, if, especially if you think you overpaid. So you might be looking a little bit more, scrutinizing a little bit more. For sure. So last one, and this really just speaks to the industry as a whole. Only 23% of the guest se sentiment and, and this is total guest sentiment, was negative. Yeah. You know, I put on here, even during a stress tested summer season, hoteliers out there are still able to provide a high level of service to guests. And people are still just enjoying travel for the most part. Majority of people are still having a majority of positive experiences than they are

Jason Lee:
Negative. That’s probably one of those things that I, I talk about a lot when I talk. ’cause I think from the hotel side, we feel that most of the information that we get from guests is negative. Yeah. Right. And it’s not Right. It’s mostly positive. Yeah. And I think there was something to be said for, you know, the industry as a whole, especially as we’re looking at some like key factors that you were talking about, like cleanliness, like service, even though maybe service going down in quantity, I think we’re seeing overall lifts in these areas, which are really important. And it’s important to travel in general. So very exciting stats.

Ryan Embree:
It was, it, it was a huge summer for the industry. We kind of anticipated that potential storm clouds ahead with, with some macro factors out there. But we’ll see. I mean, fall kids going back to school typically a slow, slower season for hoteliers. See how we adjust to that. But you know, as you wrap up the summer, this is a great time to kind of take inventory, take a deep dive into this sentiment data. Not just the big takeaways that we talked about today, but your own hotel and you know, sometimes you can even see what your competitors are doing. Right? Yeah. I think a lot of hoteliers stay so focused on what am I doing right? What am I doing wrong? Not looking at your local competition to see, maybe there’s some opportunities there to talk about what might be opportunities for you to take more market share. But this is a great time to take inventory, figure out again what you’re doing right, what you’re doing wrong, and, you know, prepare yourself for the fall season, which might be a little bit slower.

Jason Lee:
You are. So right on. And I think, you know, the fall season’s definitely going to be slower than the summer season, but I think it all comes down, as we all know, it comes down to market share. There’s a finite number of travelers in a market in any given night, and we’re all vying for it. Yeah. You know, every individual location is buying inside of their segment for that guest. And it’s the guest, it’s the hotels that provide consistency. I think you are so right on in using this information to assess strengths and weaknesses and, you know, know, go after those things with a vengeance to make sure that you know, guests have like these consistent, positive experiences at, in every phase of their stay. And with every element of your

Ryan Embree:
Facility. I agree. This is where all the, the good and the bad bubble up at its highest peak. So if people continue to say good things about one particular thing that is a specialty, that is a sweet spot, so to speak about your property and you need to double down on those efforts, you need to double down on that marketing there. Same thing on the other end. If you’re seeing a lot of negative feedback that was probably an issue in the spring, winter, and fall. You didn’t have enough occupancy to, to make it bubble up to the top for you to notice. Really, really take this time to take inventory and, we’ll be back here in the fall with some false sentiment data. Very curious to see a number of reviews and, and what insights we’ll be talking about then. So Jason, pleasure having you on the Suite Spot once again. And we’ll talk to you next time on the Suite Spot.