Maybe you and your group are tired of building cardboard flotillas. You’d really welcome some fresh team-building ideas. Or perhaps even more pressing, you’d appreciate reliable information on how well those four-
and five-star hotels you’re considering perform when it comes to meetings.
Where do you go for some peer intelligence on those and other meetings-pertinent topics? You could put out an all points e-mail bulletin to planners in your personal sphere or do a phone chat with your best friend in the industry, but how about tapping the knowledge of thousands in the industry who are as close to you as your computer screen?
Coming to several fledgling websites near you is meetings intelligence, offered online by and for planners and other industry partners. Early players on this new field say their breadth of information is growing by the day, and it’s just a matter of time until planners regard such sites as among their primary resources.
Site creators have as their inspiration gigantic leisure travel Web successes like TripAdvisor, Expedia and Hotels.com, where millions of travelers learn and relate the good, the bad and the ugly about hotels and other suppliers. Chatter that used to occur around a water cooler or over cocktails now rides on these sites—with worldwide exposure.
The biggest impediment to the development and deployment of similar sites for the meetings industry, however, may be the reluctance of planners to participate.
Consumer-Site Success
TripAdvisor is certainly surfing the top of the Web’s social media (Web 2.0, in which users post content) wave of success, with over 30 million visitors per month, and it’s inspiring similar site designs for the meetings industry. Yelp counts about 5 million unique visitors per month. Users read and post reviews about hotels, and some sites allow hotels to respond to what’s said about them. As these sites have become exceedingly popular, some hotels fear their influence on buyers, and many hotels monitor the sites religiously.
Because these online tools have become so powerful, “Web Reputation” monitoring tools have also popped up on the Internet, whereby hotels can monitor—for a fee—what people are saying about their product on a variety of sites. For example, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide recently tapped ReviewAnalyst to provide over 900 Starwood properties with the ability to analyze reviews.
Avalon Report’s Maureen Dime says that when her San Diego-based company first started monitoring traveler reviews and ratings for hotels and resorts in 2005, hoteliers mostly thought Web comments about their properties were probably coming from their competition down the street. But with development and more sophistication in the technology, the sites have learned how to validate authenticity.
“‘Word of mouse’ has changed everything for hotels,” Dime says. “They’ve learned that being paralyzed by fear isn’t helpful. Now they know these sites are here to stay, and understand they need to monitor and interact. Some have even learned that negative comments can help them steer capital improvement dollars to their doors if they get frequent complaints about rundown facilities, etc.”
Max Starkov, a hospitality industry business strategist who offers marketing advice about website design, search engine marketing and online reputation monitoring, says hotel reviews posted on TripAdvisor and Expedia can affect a property the most due to their user volume. Other sites aren’t so consequential.
He tells his hotel clients that monitoring the sites is just the first step. If they find negatives, it is imperative to respond.
“The reviews can stay on these biggest sites for a long time,” Starkov says, “and consumers do pay a lot of attention to them. Because TripAdvisor has done a lot of things to weed out bogus or questionable reviews—like something written by a hotel itself or its PR operative—they have built up trust.”
So if consumer sites are so successful in influencing consumer buying decisions, can sites that are oriented to the meetings industry mirror the effect?
Both Starkov and meetings industry technology consultant Corbin Ball say maybe, with some caveats.
“Successful sites require a critical mass of participants,” Ball says. “Trip-Advisor has been up and running for about three years and statistics indicate these social sites are becoming a major way for leisure travelers to make their buying decisions. It’s inevitable that similar sites for the meetings industry would follow.”
Starkov sees review sites for the industry as a good idea, but with a limited audience.
“B2B [business-to-business] ventures cannot expect masses of users,” he opines. “Maybe these meetings startup sites for reviews and ratings get acquired by StarCite or some other large industry site that already has a lot of eyeballs and a big e-mail database. Also, nothing stops TripAdvisor from opening a special section for meeting planners, because it’s important business for hotels.”
Rating Meeting Performance
When MeetingUniverse (www.meetingsuniverse.com) launched about two-and-a-half years ago, there was little if anything on the Web for planners to tap into to share reviews and opinions specific to meetings, says founder Russell Ridge.
“I had been involved in the meetings business and kept seeing planners get blindsided by hotel properties that never changed anything, but counted on the transient nature of meetings to get them through—a ‘sucker’ attitude, if you will,” Ridge says. “I began to look at the Mobil and AAA ratings systems and realized they have nothing to do with meetings. They send one person out to a property for a couple of days, so you get only one person’s viewpoint on things that have absolutely nothing to do with meetings. This means you have five-star properties performing poorly on the meetings side.”
Ridge’s 2,500-member site asks planners to answer over 100 questions about properties. MeetingUniverse.com accepts reviews on properties only if the planner conducted an event with at least 50 people.
“There must be enough substance to put some stress on a property,” he says. “Other meetings review sites go with the approach that one review is just as good as two. In our system, a hotel gets rated once 10 planners submit reviews and a hotel’s management completes a survey about the property’s attributes and meeting performance. Until a hotel receives a full rating, a disclaimer appears on the site that it has reviews but not an actual rating.”
Tim Ryan, a 25-year hospitality industry veteran, says he launched his Meetings Intelligence Exchange site last December and now has 500 vetted members.
“Our system is available to both planners and hoteliers,” Ryan says. “Hoteliers pay us to access it, which is our only source of revenue right now.
“We looked at TripAdvisor and Hotels.com and others and spoke with hoteliers,” he continues. “Many of them weren’t confident that the information shared on consumer sites is trustworthy, so we wanted to get credibility. We ask planners to apply for membership, and our approval process determines if they are real, because we capture e-mail addresses and ask them to share a bio and affiliations. Some members participate in the review exchange, some don’t. We address 15 different areas that our advisory board identified as being critical to a meeting’s success; things like staff services, guest room decor and cleanliness, recreation…the whole gambit that’s pertinent, so people get not only a review, but data to back it up.”
At Meetings Intelligence Exchange (www.meetingsintelligenceexchange.com) users see more than hotel reviews. They have personal intelligence “dashboards” on which they can capture a library of reviews about the hotels they are considering, and anytime another review hits the site, it automatically gets sent to the planner’s dashboard. Information on the performance of sales and conference managers is included, and Ryan says the system empowers the planner to select their manager of choice. Planners may have a public or private profile in the system. Reviews get vetted by the Meetings Intelligence team to verify information, Ryan adds.
“If someone says information is inaccurate, we call both the planner and the hotelier,” he says. “If someone posts inaccurate data, they lose membership. I don’t think anyone else is doing this kind of vetting.”
Meetings Collaborative (www.meetingscollaborative.com) is one of the newest sites, launched in September. Veteran industry presenter and consultant Joan Eisenstodt partnered with the site’s founder, Chris White, also an industry veteran, who says he wants it “to become the ultimate hotel review site by planners in the U.S.”
“Our vision is that we will replace Mobil and AAA ratings for planners,” he says. “We also want to become the one and only site a planner will use when they have a problem, and it will get answered promptly by peers.”
For now, Meetings Collaborative asks for planner reviews only on hotels, but White says the site will eventually include production companies and cities. (How are the airlift and ground transportation, local DMCs, restaurants for dine-arounds, etc.?)
“We want to report on reliable service providers of all kinds, discuss pressing issues and share best practices,” he says. “By helping each other do our jobs well, we’re moving the industry forward.”
Eisenstodt conducts a discussion group, blogs and serves on the Meetings Collaborative advisory board.
“I’ve moderated Mimlist and Mpinet,” she says, “but we could post only positive things because of libel concerns. With Meetings Collaborative, we are looking for more objective information. Our hope is that people will write complete reviews with plenty of specifics about their meeting’s experience. The blog is mine, but the discussion boards belong to everybody. The more information we have and the more voices on any subject gives us intelligence and good online community.”
Building Community and Trust
One thing all the new meetings review sites have in common is the need to build community. Planners like Eli Gorin, a Miami-based planner of international meetings in South America and elsewhere, say they simply don’t have enough time to participate. As a Meetings Collaborative advisory board member, Gorin says he has used the site’s message board some but he has not written any reviews because of time poverty, a typical reason planners give for not adding to online meetings intelligence.
However, Gorin says he hopes that situation will change.
“This is a resource that can be very useful for planners,” he says, “because the reviews get beyond the marketing fluff put out by hotels. This is an opportunity to do for peer planners what TripAdvisor does for travelers—get opinions that are useful. If I go to TripAdvisor I don’t trust what people say because they’ve probably just been at a property on vacation.”
Besides time poverty, there’s the issue of candor. Some planners think that if they put their honest experience and opinion on a site, any negativity could reflect on them professionally. Not only could a hotel boycott them, such reviews could affect their professional standing. Bad experiences can be blamed on a supplier as well as the one who hired them. Some planners also fear they will be get overwhelmed by marketers who find them online.
All the meetings intelligence site managers say they are grappling with building participation, and a couple offer incentives. MeetingUniverse.com offers anonymity as a solution.
“All hotel reviews are held as anonymous to other planners and hotels, thus preventing any retribution by a property that doesn’t appreciate the truth,” Ridge says. “On the flip side, we allow hotels to contest a planner rating that the hotel deems incorrect or fraudulent.”
Ryan is doing random $100 gift retail and resort card drawings for planners who write reviews for Meetings Intelligence Exchange. And soon, planners will be rated according to how many reviews they submit and the length of time they’ve been on the network.
“This raises a planner’s credibility,” Ryan says.
There’s no magical way to get participation, Eisenstodt maintains.
“I’ve been running online communities for 10 years, and know it’s hard to get people to use any website, because there is so much out there,” she says. “Also, it takes time for people to trust a community. They must believe there is value in it for them. If planners know the site vets people, then maybe they will be honest. My role with Meetings Collaborative is to educate people that it is a valid site with a quality advisory board, good opinions and a good place to go for help. If I were a hotel manager where a planner had a successful meeting, I would suggest that the planner write a review.”
But until the time comes when many more planners see the benefits of dedicating their time and experience to grow the intelligence exchange, the old-fashioned methods will likely prevail.
