Best Western Embraces Criticism

Sep 28, 12 | 12:02 am

By Ava Roxanne Stritt

Best Western is now embracing your travel reviews. Just this week they added a prominent link to TripAdvisor to enable potential customers to see reviews about their locations more efficiently and quickly. Thus, hopefully enabling them to not totally leave their website and still book straight through Best Western. Hotel brands are now hoping to move toward more customers staying loyal and using only their own branded websites or phone their own customer service representatives to book hotel stays and also those importantly hotel and spa deals.

Best Western's move was included as an update to their website. It was well thought out, so that the TripAdvisor reviews open in a small box and do not take the customer away from Best Western's own website. Hotels are now embracing the reviews (sometimes even not so good ones) as a chance to interact with both current customers and potential customers. Responding to a bad review on TripAdvisor shows that the hotel has a beating heart and customers just love that type of authenticity in a hotel chain. Remember "We'll leave the light on for you"? This is now the digital age's way of leaving the light on for you.

With social media guests of hotels can sometimes be interacting with the hotel without even touching the front desk buttons on their hotel room phones. Recently, the Four Seasons Atlanta answered questions about my dining dining needs before I even got dressed for the day from a simple tweet inquiry. That was definitely much quicker of an answer than I expected.

The hospitality industry has been doing both a unique and better job than some of industries with embracing social media and forging ahead with new concepts. Some hotels have fine tuned it much better than others. In the luxury chains, The Ritz-Carlton Hotels, seem to have a leading edge with bountiful social media channels all the way down to their local hotels. The twitter feed ofThe Ritz-Carlton Buckhead holds a lively chat most days, but especially Sunday along with Spa Travel Gal and her Skincare Sunday (#skincaresunday) Twitter chats.

Next time you have a hotel question just tweet the chain account. Your results may be the best hospitality you will get all day!

Source: Examiner.com