Major travel provider Expedia announced the release of two new products today that aim to give hoteliers real time guest reviews and up-to-date rates: Real Time Feedback and Sell Tonight.
Available now in select U.S. test markets, the products represent more additions to Expedia PartnerCentral (EPC), a hotel-facing tool suite that has recently been revamped.
Real Time Feedback allows guests to give a hotel review right after they check in to an Expedia.com-booked hotel. They receive three short questions via an email or an app notification: "How was your check-in?"; "How is your room?" and "Are you happy with the location?" This allows for guests to give a quick review in a simple way, while also allowing for hoteliers to re-correct if a guest's experience goes awry from the start. Real Time Feedback essentially presents the ability for a hotelier to a) limit the damage and b) know that he or she needs to limit the damage.
"Our hotel partners have told us time and again that their feedback to a negative review is simply 'I wish the guest had told us, as we would've corrected the issue,'" said John Kim, chief product officer, Expedia Inc., via a press release. "So our product team began ideating how we could troubleshoot that, and Real Time Feedback was born."
The second product, Sell Tonight, continuously updates hoteliers on same-day rates in their market so they quickly and efficiently push out these rates to Expedia.com and Hotels.com customers around the world, more important than ever given guests are glued to their mobile devices (Expedia has seen 80 million app downloads so far).
Both products are examples of Expedia's commitment to technology. The company spent more than $650 million over the course of 12 months (up until September 2014) investing in technology and improving Expedia PartnerCentral.
Real Time Feedback and Sell Tonight will be rolled out globally in 2015.
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