Elite Hospitality Group Improves Guest Review Response Rate by 60%

Elite Hospitality Group is located in the Kingdom of Bahrain, an archipelago made up of 33 islands situated off the coast of Saudi Arabia, and currently operates four All Suites Hotels and three Luxury Residences. From city center resorts to business hotels, the hotel group offers a wide variety of lifestyle accommodations to its guests, catering to both the business and leisure traveler. With an array of multi cuisine and specialty restaurants, wellness spas, state-of-the-art conferencing and banquet facilities, the Elite Group’s goal is for everyone to have an exceptional stay.

However, going above and beyond for its guests is only part of building a positive hotel reputation. The group’s excellent reputation is supported by incorporating guest feedback into its daily operations. In fact, Elite Hospitality is strongly focused on the importance of reviews. Collecting and analyzing all forms of feedback received is standard operating procedure for the hotel group.

Elite Hospitality began using TrustYou in 2014 and since then, has put a guest feedback management plan in place to better understand its guests and consistently improve its operations. The hotel group uses TrustYou Analytics to analyze and manage guest feedback from sources all over the internet, and TrustYou Stars to collect direct feedback from guests through customizable guest satisfaction surveys with push to Google functionality.

So far, their results have been outstanding:

• Overall TrustScore increased by 4%, from 79.42 in 2013 to 82.54 in 2016;
• The number of Google reviews increased by a whopping 878%, from only 51 reviews in 2014 to 499 in 2016;
• The TrustYou Survey became the second most important review source, accounting for 12% out of the total number of reviews;
• The Response rate improved by 60% across all types of reviews, growing from 38% in 2013 to 98% in 2016.

“Our guests are the ones giving us the best ideas for improvement. We have already put a couple of adjustments in place based on the feedback we were getting and the response is fantastic!" says Meena Gurung, marketing executive, Elite Hospitality.

Knowing they could be conducting a better analysis of their review data, the team at Elite Hospitality picked TrustYou Analytics, TrustYou’s all-in-one platform to review and analyze guest feedback across the web. With extensive guest feedback to act on at its fingertips, the hotel chain was able to detect various areas for improvement and effectively enhance their guest experience.

“Being able to monitor guest reviews gives us the opportunity to see things from our clients’ perspective and focus on elevating our service levels. This way, we are making sure that negative issues that have already been communicated don’t occur again in the future,” Gurung noted.

Through TrustYou’s advanced semantic technology, the Elite Hospitality Group discovered that guests were unhappy with the WiFi speed. Seeing this data prompted the group to make their operational procedures more efficient and to ultimately change the WiFi connection.

After implementing this change, they started getting more positive comments regarding their internet connectivity. Consequently, their WiFi score increased by 38% in 2016 compared to 2013.

This positive trend further accelerated in 2016. The hotel group: increased its sentiment scores for Bar & Beverage by 62.31% (from 47.36 in 2013 to 76.87 in 2016) and Vibe by 60.96% (from 41.42 in 2013 to 66.67 in 2016) and received 2.5% more positive reviews in 2016 compared to previous years.

Finally, the group’s response rate improved across all types of reviews, with a significant 60% increase compared to 2013. These achievements are unsurprising given the hotel group’s property wide commitment to guest feedback management.

“We have a strong and dedicated team that is focused on responding to our guests’ reviews on a daily basis," states Gurung. "We are monitoring all the changes that show up in our response rate and if there are any reviews that are left unresponded, I personally make sure to address them right away."

TrustYou reports have made the hotel group more accountable for their actions and helped them make immediate business decisions to drive service improvements across the board.

Knowing how crucial it is for hotels to bring guest feedback into its daily operations, Elite Hospitality decided to sign up for TrustYou Stars as a way to get more direct feedback and create better visibility within search rankings. With TrustYou’s surveys, when guests respond to feedback requests from hotels, they are given the opportunity to submit their comments to Google, thus increasing the hotel’s volume of public reviews and making it more visible for travelers looking for accommodation online.

As mentioned earlier, within the course of only two years, the group’s number of Google reviews increased by a massive 878%, from 51 reviews in 2014 to 499 in 2016.

A larger collection of public reviews on Google can significantly impact a hotel’s visibility within search results, making it a lot easier for travelers to find it online. This can lead to a higher click-through rate to the hotel’s website and, proportionately, more direct bookings. In addition to gaining more reviews, the hotel group found that by soliciting reviews, the feedback they received was more positive. And within only two years of using TrustYou Stars, Elite Hospitality’s own surveys became the second most important source of guest feedback, accounting for more than 12% out of the total number of reviews.