I’ve written previously about the importance of Owning Your Guests. My preferred service to use and suggest to others has been GuestFolio. In short, it allows you to craft various emails to send to all your guests pre and post-stay or during their stay. Provide them with information about airport shuttle times or the weather, and ask them to fill out a survey afterwards, and so forth.
Some property management systems allow you to do this as well, mainly cloud-based ones like WebRezPro. GuestFolio integrates with so many PMS’s that it’s become a leader in communicating with your guests and helping hotels increase their revenues.
All this leads to an email I received from TripAdvisor earlier this week with the subject, “Please Respond By March 2.” Opening the email up told me they had a survey to fill out about possible new features for TripAdvisor.
The survey was very short, and this is what it had laid out:
TripAdvisor New Features
For each of the questions, TripAdvisor asked you how willing you would be to use a service that offered each concept. If you selected “Extremely Likely” or close to it, you were asked to specify prices that you would consider to be fair, too expensive, or too cheap.
Interestingly, most of the features they’ve listed are very similar to what GuestFolio offers their clients. The one thing that GuestFolio doesn’t do currently is allow communications through a messaging app or texting. There are other apps that allow this, such as TrustYou.
Right now, all of those options are more powerful than what TripAdvisor is proposing, but it is definitely a service to keep your eyes on in the coming months.