If you represent a hotel management company overseeing multiple brands, here is some food for thought on having Revinate on top of Medallia as a review response management platform. (If you are someone only handling review responses for a single hotel, this article won’t help much.) Medallia is the back end white label solution for Marriott (guestVoice), Hilton (Salt) and IHG (HeartBeat).
Review Response Platforms
The brands (in my opinion) switched due to internal survey capabilities, in which they put a weighted emphasis over external reviews. They have control over the questions, therefore they can collect more data and link to loyalty level. There is no doubt that internal surveys hold weight, but to the future booker, who is trying to make a decision on where to stay, are they looking more at brand reviews, or external sites such as TripAdvisor/Google/Expedia? An old 2015 Expedia survey says 38 sites.
But, back to the subject at hand. There are things to consider against having an additional system, and using Revinate in addition to Medallia. Below, I’ll recap the major usages of Medallia versus Revinate as a hotel review management platform from a hotel management company perspective.
Push versus Pull
Revinate captures all reviews AND responses once LIVE. They do a regular scrub of sites and collect data, so no matter how someone chose to respond to a review, Revinate will capture once live. This is a Pull system.
To remove alerts in Medallia, you must log into their system and say you took care of it. The system isn’t designed to tell that you already did take care of it, if that is the case. This is a Push system. The only positive of this is one can telling when you tried to respond to a review. Given some review sites in delayed publishing of responses, it may appear the response took longer than it actually did.
Consistency Across Brands
Let’s consider you are a management company with multiple brands, let’s say 5 Hilton, 5 Marriott and 5 IHG. The only way to compare across your portfolio with Medallia is to log into 3 systems, export into Excel then merge the data. Unless someone know something I don’t?
Revinate compares across all hotels and brands with one log in.
Reporting
The customized reporting in Revinate crushes Medallia reporting. You can pull trending for volume of TripAdvisor versus Google reviews, for example, for your entire portfolio. The Medallia reporting is good to compare against brand specific averages, which Revinate doesn’t have, but depends on your metrics. Medallia has alot of filters, but it is quite cumbersome. Revinate also has a great portfolio roll up Report (GS2) that you assign to be sent automatically to corporate users as often as you choose (weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly). And their sentiment analysis, that you can see at a glance with 1 button click, is superior.
If your teams are competitive (aren’t they all?) consider a contest who can have the greatest quarter over quarter increase in Google reviews. This will also have a positive impact on your Google Search placement. You would need Revinate’s custom reporting platform to pull this data easily across brands.
Cons to Both Review Management Platforms
There are some cons on both platforms. Neither platform pulls Yelp reviews any longer. Granted this platform is more for restaurants, but hotels DO get reviews via this platform. Neither manage social listening outside of the mentioned platforms. For example, if your hotel is mentioned in a blog posts, there is not notification. Guess that is why you have Google Alerts.
IHG and Hilton just recently (in the last 2 years or so) transitioned from Revinate to Medallia. The reality is, as a branded hotel with Marriott, IHG or Hilton, you are stuck with Medallia as long as they are the preferred choice for the brands. But, there are value adds to have Revinate on top of Medallia. If you choose this route, they have corporate only roles so you can save costs by not having to get log ins for each respective hotel team.