Hotel rooms now come with hot and cold detractor fans
May 30, 2005
What can you add to a hotel which seems to have everything? How about bad publicity? The Fort Garry Hotel is probably as well-equipped as any in Winnipeg. It has two hundred and forty two suites with wifi, feather beds and a complimentary in-room cookie service to mess up your Italian sheets.
It has a fitness centre with a running track, a new spa on the way and the kitchen won best brunch in town from a national newspaper. Unfortunately for its marketing department it also has Jeremy Wright.
Let’s pretend you are heading to Winnipeg next month for the jazz festival. You need somewhere to stay, you spot Fort Garry on the tourist map and execute a quick search on Google.
There it is: The Fort Garry Hotel on page one, just as you hoped.
But wait…
There are Jeremy Wright’s comments as well, currently hogging second and third spot.
You can hardly miss them. And you can hardly miss the headline: The Fort Garry Hotel Sucks. That’s going to grab your attention.
Room for complaint
Luckily for Fort Garry, Jeremy Wright is no determined detractor. Ensight, his weblog, isn’t dedicated to criticising your hotel. Nor has he committed his every waking hour to destroying your reputation.
He’s more of a detractor fan; he has good things and bad things to say about his experience. Great food almost compensates for a bit of construction work; expensive gym fees and wifi access are almost forgotten when he dips into the swimming pool. Sadly it’s a noisy party on the seventh floor which finally pushes him over the edge.
The message for any hotel which cares about its reputation is not so much what Jeremy Wright says about Fort Garry but the fact that what he says about the place can be so readily found. And by anyone with $350 Canadian in their pocket, looking for a room.
The reason is simple. Wright is a blogger, with a high profile and plenty of in-bound links to his name. As a result, Google is attracted to his blog like Yogi Bear to a picnic basket.
Posts by influential bloggers have become the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to the internet’s Jellystone Park and Google does a great job of tracking them down then treating them like rare ambrosia.
Ransom notes
In a piece about the Scottish tourist industry in the Scotsman this morning, Gillian Bowditch wrote:
Tourism is unique in that its reputation is routinely held to ransom by anecdote. A couple of bad experiences can ruin a holiday and will inevitably be passed on to a dozen other potential visitors.
She is right but the reality of globally-networked markets is that a couple of bad experiences can also be passed on to a few million potential visitors if those experiences happen to the wrong person (or in this case the Wright person) and thence to Google.
Be smarter than the average bear
It’s clear more hotels, restaurants, tour operators and tourist businesses will experience the Fort Garry factor as influential commentators record the highs and lows of their travel experiences.
Shel Holtz, whose posts often rank highly on Google, started a site this week specifically to blog about his travelling misadventures (credit: Neville Hobson). Darren Barefoot recently launched a travel site specifically for geeks (a group which crafts more peanut butter and jelly sandwiches than any other as far as Google is concerned). And last year Robert Scoble, Microsoft’s influential blogger, reported a poor experience in a Vancouver hotel in a post which reverberated round the blogosphere.
So what are the takeaways from this particular buffet? What can hotels do to avoid detractors remodelling their online space to their disadvantage?
Monitor your online presence, provide a service so remarkable it creates loyal evangelists, generate an aura of goodwill around you on the internet and always address complaints effectively and efficiently so that a detractor becomes a fan long before he puts fingers to the keyboard.
Tags: reputation management, online reputations, hotel marketing, tourism, blogs, bloggers