In the latest luxury hotel benchmarking, hotels continue to see traction from word-of-mouth recommendations driven by overall satisfaction and generally healthy Net Promoter Scores.
The study relies on the guest review software from BluSky Marketing, which takes guest reviews directly from verified guests and asks them a series of questions to effectively breakdown the hows, whys and wheres of the hotel's inbound and on-site marketing/experience efforts.
Net Promoter Scores continue to infiltrate all levels of industry, fast becoming the standard way to determine how likely a business is to gain further business through word-of-mouth recommendations.
Katie Scott, the Marketing Manager at one of the client hotels, the Rockliffe Hall, finds value in learning their own competitive position via the benchmarking and extensive survey process outside of the TripAdvisor ecosystem:
“As a luxury hotel we need to keep working on and improving upon our guest experience, and the feedback we secure via the hotel guest experience survey independently managed by BluSky Marketing enables us to do that in easily and in a method convenient for our guests."
Chris Larsen, BluSky's Managing Director, believes that there is very real value in overperforming in these sorts of surveys:
“The difference to the bottom line if you compare like for like properties at either end of the spectrum could be £135,000 per annum plus.”
The survey shows that previous and word-of-mouth/recommendations drives 44% of hotel business. In addition:
- Selected hotels achieving 5% via email marketing and 2% via social media.
- Trip Advisor business listings drive approximately twice the amount of business versus non-TA business listing.
- Calling a hotel direct to make a reservation still accounts for 50% of business, followed by hotels website at 21%.
There are two very straightforward takeaways for hoteliers:
- Continue to invest in guest experience improvements to drive non commission repeat business and to stimulate positive WOM & recommendations.
- With 71% of guests making a hotel reservation by calling or the hotels website, ensure the phone number is prominently displayed at the top left and is enabled for guest to easily “click & call” via their smartphone.
The full report can be downloaded
here.