114 – TMG’s Spring Guest Sentiment Report: Key Takeaways

Suite Spot: A Hotel Marketing Podcast

Guest sentiment data continues to provide hoteliers with insightful and valuable information that they can harness to position their hotel properties better. By learning what travelers say and feel about their hotel stays during spring, hotels and hotel management companies can better align their digital strategies for the busy summer season. Through analyzing over 1.7 million reviews and over 7.5 million guest sentiment tags, Suite Spot host Ryan Embree and TMG Chief Technology Officer Jason Lee break down the top 5 takeaways from the 2nd edition of our annual Spring Guest Sentiment Report. This is an episode hoteliers can not afford to miss. Tune in now! Suite Spot Podcast · 114 - TMG's Spring Guest Sentiment Report: Key Takeaways 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, and welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, as always, Ryan Embree. Thank you so much for joining us today, wherever you're listening from or viewing us from on our YouTube page. We are here in our content creation studio at Travel Media Group headquarters just north of Orlando. And I am here with a very familiar guest and voice, Mr. Jason Lee, our Chief Technology Officer at Travel Media Group. Jason, welcome back to the Suite Spot. Jason Lee: Thank you for having me. Ryan Embree: We got a very exciting episode for you today. Memorial Day just passed. We saw the record breaking numbers, pre pandemic levels of travel. I'm sure a lot of hotel listeners are very excited to hear that. It's looking like it's gonna be an even bigger summer, which we're gonna talk about. But today what we're gonna be doing is we're gonna be looking at all of that feedback that guests left us over this spring, and hopefully what this is gonna do is give us some insights, and some takeaways that we can use in these summer months to potentially leverage our marketing and increase our chance of conversion, which is what every hotelier should be doing. Since this is a sales and marketing podcast, we love to do that for you. But Jason, take us through first, what is this data that we're seeing and why is it more accurate than, let's say, a survey of just like a thousand travelers? Jason Lee: So what we do is we use natural language processing to pull out like key pieces of information. So it's traveler sentiment, so how they're feeling about these various items. So you could have people that are both happy and upset in the same review, based on categories. So we start this, we start this whole thing with category. So we look at a bunch of different tags inside of room category, inside of a facilities category, inside of a service category. And then further past that we look at the various aspects of those tags. So I'll just give you an example. So an example would be a room, it would be bed, right? So room would be the category. The tag would be bed. The aspects of that tag would be sheets, pillows, sleep quality. It could be all of these other pieces that, so many factors, Yeah. That make up this stuff. And so, so we extract that data from each, review that comes in regardless of so completely agnostic of the rating of the review, just looking at the actual information that comes from the text. Ryan Embree: Yeah, and that's something that, that we preach to our hotel partners is just because you have a five star review or a one star review on the other side, doesn't mean there's both positive, neutral and negative elements to that review. Absolutely. And what this is doing, and this is pulling out all of that sentiment, it's over a lot of data,