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Google Places, Hotels and Online Reputation Management
What’s cheaper than an ad in the Yellow Pages, free for customers to search online, and easily updated and controlled by you and your business? The answer is Google Places – and it’s a great outlet for hotels and other businesses in and out of the hospitality business to manage their online reputation for free.
Hotels and other hospitality companies can control and influence the description, categories, additional details, special offers, images and reviews on their Google Places listing. Because they maintain control of the listing, hotel owners and operators must regularly ensure the content is complete, accurate and up to date.
Laurian Clemence, who works in corporate communications and public affairs with Google UK, recommends making sure that the hotel’s name, address, phone number and other identifying information are listed in a consistent manner across the Web. Since users only have 200 characters to describe their hotel property, Clemence recommends the creation of multiple listings if there is a restaurant, lounge, spa or other business within the hotel with its own name and telephone number.
Once a basic presence has been established on Google Places and another similar service in beta – Google Hotel Finder – the most important step in online reputation management involves reviews provided through the sites “Write a review” button. Because third-party reviews have been removed from Places listings, Google Places is limited in terms of reviews because there is limited information provided about the reviewer and content cannot be sorted as it can on third-party sites such as TripAdvisor and Yelp.
However, Daniel Edward Craig of Hospitality Net said products such as Google+ and Hotel Finder and the integration of other old products allows for easier monitoring, soliciting and responding to user reviews from hotel customers on Google. Currently, the main way to respond to negative reviews is to “Flag as inappropriate” if the review is inaccurate, but Google is planning to enhance the reviews portion of Places in the future. Regarding the future of the service, Clemence said, “We’ll continue adding features to Google Places to make it even easier for users to rate, discover and share places with friends and family whenever they’re using Google.”
