Tripadvisor Amsterdam number 1 spot for Htel
Tuesday, 31 May 2011
Htel Serviced apartments reached the number 1 spot on Tripadvisor on specialty lodging last week. And we’d like to thank you for this. Yes you! In the end you’re the ones giving us the appreciation for us to reach this spot.
Here’s our version on how you made us the best choice for consumers for a short stay in Amsterdam.
Our guests have always been at the number 1 spot for Htel Serviced Apartments. We never lost sight of that. Online had become a different story though. Having worked in hotels my whole life, I knew how explosively consumers had moved from searching and booking travel offline to online. However I remember well, last year, the beginning of 2010, at Htel we had lost track a bit of where our online consumers were. We were not even certain if they existed.
On top I felt we had to catch up with the competition. Our online business was not running as it should, and we were not involved in Social Media at all. We had limited traffic on our website, and we did not generate any revenue online.
We decided to make a huge jump forward, and made a serious, long term investment in our website, online marketing and social media marketing.
Now, almost 1,5 years later, Htel is picking the fruits of this investment. And our consumers are guests are proving it first and foremost. We actually hit the number one spot on Tripadvisor for specialty lodging. We got here via an intense metamorphosis.
For the readers that are not familiar with Tripadvisor: Tripadvisor is one of the biggest travel websites in the world. Tripadvisor has built a worldwide reputation for being the most trusted travel advice site. Millions of people share their experiences about their trips all over the world right there. This is what Tripadvisor specializes in: consumer reviews. You can find more than 45 million on this site. And these reviews are simply put the most trustworthy information for consumers about lodging providers.
Before starting with a Tripadvisor and social media campaign, we first fully redid our website together with our business partner Xotels.
The Social Media campaign was never focused on a single medium only. Xotels built us personalized pages on Facebook and Twitter and gave us trainings and guidance on how to use the different social media. They also showed us the ropes in Tripadvisor, and ensured continues responses by me to all reviews we're getting.
The Tripadvisor guest responses really are what we are putting in the effort for. We are getting the interaction that we're looking for with our guests. We also receive tremendously valuable feedback on how we're truly doing. Not only the good stuff, but also where our guests think that we improve.
It drives us to be better all the time, and to provide the best possible service for all of our guests. Therefore we encourage our guests to give us this feedback online.
The result is showing clearly how valuable the investment has been. And how important this effort is to all of you. You are telling us that it's the best thing we could have done.
So just one more time: Thank you!
Best regards,
Ingmar Sloothaak
General Manager
Htel Serviced Apartments
