16 – Advice From a Hotel Review Response Writer

Suite Spot: A Hotel Marketing Podcast

In this episode of Suite Spot, we pick the brain of a true hotel review response expert. Kristeena Seckinger, who has responded to over 100,000 hotel reviews in her career, joins host Ryan Embree to talk about what it takes to be a successful hotel review response writer and shares some best practices for online review response. From the proper length of a review response to which sites are the most important to respond to, Kristeena covers it all regarding review response. Ryan and Kristeena also talk about how to manage brand expectations and standards when it comes to review response and the emotional toll responding to reviews can have on a hotelier. In the Q&A segment, Kristeena delivers some insightful do and don'ts to a hotelier who is looking to make review response a priority in 2019. To submit a question for future episodes, call or text 407-984-7455. Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot where hoteliers check in and we check out what's trending in hotel marketing. I'm your host, Ryan Embree. Ryan Embree: Hello and thanks for listening. This is Ryan Embree, your host of the Suite Spot. Happy 2019 to all of our listeners. It's a new year, and we've got a new episode here of Suite Spot. Very excited about the episode we have today. It is going to be circled all around responding to reviews. So today in our What's News, we're going to be looking at a white paper on travelmediagroup.com, which is what makes a good review response writer. And in this white paper you're going to get some best practices, some tools and resources on how to respond to reviews. If you're delegating that to someone at your property, how to make sure that you're getting the most out of them. Or, if you're responding to reviews yourself, making sure you are doing everything you need to do in order to get those great responses out there. We know how the brains have really raised their expectations of hoteliers when it comes to review response. We know how important this is and the standards are getting stricter and stricter when it comes to review response. So with that being said, we've got a really special guest with us. She has actually been with us since the conception of our solution Respond & Resolve where we actually partner with hotels to respond to reviews, our Senior Reputation Analyst Kristeena Seckinger. So without further ado, let's go ahead and welcome in Kristeena. Good Morning Kristeena. How are you? Kristeena S.: Good morning, Ryan. I'm doing great. How are you doing? Ryan Embree: I'm excellent. I'm super excited that you had the opportunity to be with us live here on the Suite Spot, and I want to first start off with with kind of an easy question. You, you have, like I mentioned before, you were here at the very beginning of this solution, Respond & Resolve. So since that time, how many reviews have you personally responded to? Kristeena S.: Well, I have been here over three years now and so within that time I've probably responded to about 117,000 reviews. Ryan Embree: Wow. That is, that is an incredible number. I have to ask, you know, with so many review sites online today, and you know you being a expert in review response, what would you say your personal opinion is of which is the most important site to make sure your reviews are responded to? Kristeena S.: Well, there are a lot of factors to look at when thinking about the answer to that question. Previously, I would have said with confidence that maybe TripAdvisor might have been the most important just because they have that brand recognition and travelers are always going to TripAdvisor to look for reviews about the hotel. More and more now, we are seeing more content in Google.