63 – Top 5 Sentiment Tags in 2020

Suite Spot: A Hotel Marketing Podcast

In this special edition of the Suite Spot, our review response team at Travel Media Group analyzes and identifies the Top 5 sentiment tags of 2020. Host Ryan Embree is joined by Product Director, Patrick O’Brien to discuss COVID-19's impact on traveler reviews and each of the most popular sentiment tags. Patrick also shares some best practices on how to respond to online reviews when these tags are mentioned and ways to get creative and provide a unique hotel experience for guests during this time. If you are interested in learning more about Travel Media Group’s Respond & Resolve™ program, you can reach us by calling or texting us at 407-984-7455 or email us at [e-mail]. Suite Spot Podcast · 63 - Top 5 Sentiment Tags in 2020 Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot where hoteliers check-in and we check out what's trending in hotel marketing. I'm your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of the Suite Spot. This is your host Ryan Embree, we have a very special episode for you today, been looking forward to this episode for a very long time. It's actually one of the most popular episodes that we've done since we've started the Suite Spot and with me today is our special guest, Product Director at Travel Media Group, Patrick O'Brien. Patrick, welcome back to the Suite Spot. Patrick O'Brien: Thank you very much for having me glad to be here. Ryan Embree: Yeah and we're excited today because Patrick and I, what we're doing, is that we are going to look at the top five sentiment tags of 2020. So it's been an absolutely crazy year: COVID-19, election year, all these significant things going on in our industry, yet customers still leaving reviews. And at Travel Media Group, obviously we have our Respond and Resolve solution, which responds to reviews - but we don't necessarily just respond. Patrick, your team actually goes in and provides insights to hoteliers. Before we get started, could you explain just a little bit behind what this sentiment analysis is and how your team actually pulls that out of the guest feedback? Patrick O'Brien: So, you know, with every review that comes in our team is obviously reading the review in advance so that we can respond to it, but we're actually going through and looking at various elements within the review and we score those based on, you know, positive, negative and neutral sentiment. And where it's a little bit different, sometimes I think there's some AI engines out there that do it and sometimes they basically do it based off of the star rating of the review, and I think that's fast and efficient. However, what it misses is the ability to really identify when maybe negative sentiment is left within the positive review or there are positive attributes to a negative review. And having, you know, human interaction within there, we're able to sort of elicit those meanings a bit more accurately in the review so that we can really understand, you know, not every positive review is, you know, all roses and not every negative review is all bad. So we can start to dissect when things are maybe not good with a specific experience, what elements were things that the hotel could market on capitalize on, and you know, what elements do they need to work better at improving? So we really go in and each review is hand scored by someone on our team. Ryan Embree: And it's fascinating to take a look at all of that data, all that sentiment and analytics, put together like something we're going to do today - but just to put in perspective Patrick, how many reviews is your team responding to? Let's just talk about reviews first. Patrick O'Brien: Sure yeah. So, you know, this year,