Hotel websites embrace TripAdvisor, bad reviews and all

(Photo: Red Roof Inn)

It's getting harder to avoid reading TripAdvisor hotel reviews on hotel chain websites.

Last week, the 350-location budget hotel chain Red Roof Inn announced it will incorporate TripAdvisor reviews - whether good, bad or ugly - on its redroof.com website. The average customer pays about $60 a night to sleep in a Red Roof Inn property.

The chain joins a group of about 50 hotel chains that now publish or promote TripAdvisor reviews on their individual hotel websites, believing that they can gain more bookings.

Andy Alexander, Red Roof's president, says that most consumers look for TripAdvisor reviews while shopping for a hotel, so it just makes sense to provide them so they won't be tempted to consider a rival's hotel.

When considering a Red Roof hotel, an online shopper will see a pop-up screen that shows the five most recent TripAdvisor reviews, Alexander says. There's no need to click through to TripAdvisor's website.

"We don't want people to leave our site," he tells USA TODAY's Hotel Check-In. "The worst thing that can happen is they click out to TripAdvisor and see a different property that they'd rather stay at."

Hotel chains help TripAdvisor grow

Red Roof is only the latest hotel chain to decide it's worth the risk of publishing TripAdvisor reviews on its website alongside its own content. Today, about 50 hotel chains have joined the club, according to TripAdvisor.

In the past year, chains as diverse as Wyndham, Best Western and Four Seasons have taken this direction. Starwood, on the other hand, opted to solicit frequent guests to write reviews on its own website; in about a 12-month period ending last October, customers submitted some 42,000 reviews.

Hotel partnerships are helping fuel growth for the No. 1 online review site, which for the July-September period posted revenue of about $213 million.

On TripAdvisor's third-quarter earnings call earlier this month, CEO Stephen Kaufer told Wall Street analysts that TripAdvisor's total traffic grew by around 35% in the most recent quarter.

"Including these latest wins," he told analysts referring to Best Western and Wyndham, "we now syndicate our traveler reviews to more than 500 major travel partners, including more than 50 hotel chains, reinforcing and enhancing the visibility of the TripAdvisor brand as the de facto standard for travel research."

Earlier this month, TripAdvisor revealed that the number of people who view TripAdvisor content on sites other than TripAdvisor has doubled since 2011 to over 300 million per month, thanks to the hotel chains as well as sites such as Kayak.com.

While some individual hotels have more than 8,000 reviews, most have far fewer - but the number is growing, Kaufer told analysts.

"It's getting to the point where it's tough to find a hotel with less than 50 reviews. And that's what we're getting pretty excited about," he said.

More reviews can prompt hotels to improve

For lower-priced chains such as Red Roof, giving TripAdvisor reviews prominence to consumers as well as individual hotel property's management has another potential benefit: incentive to improve.

Promoting TripAdvisor reviews on redroof.com, Alexander says, "gives a little push to those properties who are not rates as high on TripAdvisor to increase their quality and service levels because it's right there in front of the guest."

Hotels with higher TripAdvisor scores tend to get more business than lower-ranked hotels, he says.

Is Alexander afraid of bad reviews? Yes and no.

"Overall, yes, there are risks of a having bad review, but the risk is pretty low if you run a quality property," he says. Consumers, he says, don't expect to read reviews that are positive 100% of the time.

Besides, he says, Red Roof has a program in place where managers of individual properties respond to reviews - including negative ones - regularly. Consumers see those replies as a positive sign that the hotel cares and is listening to them, he says.

The TripAdvisor move comes as the Red Roof chain moves forward with an image update.

The chain, which includes free Wi-Fi in its rates, has next-generation locations that today can be found in downtown Chicago, downtown San Antonio, Texas, and at both San Francisco and Miami's airport. By the end of March 2013, Red Roof will have about 125 renovated locations.

Source: http://www.usatoday.com/story/hotelcheckin/2012/12/20/tripadvisor-red-roof-latest-hotel-chain-wyndham-best-western/1782313/