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PR Fuel: Hospitable PRIn desperate need of a break recently, I decided to check out of my Brooklyn home office and into a Manhattan hotel for a few nights of relaxation. Finding a place to stay was not easy. There were amenities to consider, a location to decide on, and, of course, I wanted to find somewhere within a certain budget.Putting my research skills to work, I spent over a week trying to select the perfect hotel. I used a price aggregating website to find deals and then checked each hotel's website to see if I could get a better rate. (Booking directly through the hotel was always the cheaper option.) I also spent hours on TripAdvisor.com and FlyerTalk.com reading customer reviews and comments. When I finally decided on a hotel, a boutique inn owned by a small chain, one of the factors that swayed me was the fact that the hotel manager had left comments on both TripAdvisor.com and FlyerTalk.com. These comments ran the gamut from thanking guests to apologizing for difficulties that guests complained about. I mentioned this when I was speaking to the manager at check-in. "A lot of our customers say that," the manager told me. "It's funny because I didn't want to do it at first, but our public relations person made me." Ding! Ding! Ding! It was nice to hear a PR person get some praise, and it was also nice to hear that an idea that is generating business for a company came directly from a PR person. Why every hotel manager is not on TripAdvisor.com, which is outrageously popular now, is a mystery to me. And why every PR person in the hospitality business is not directing managers and other operations people to respond to negative comments is just as big a mystery. (The website provides hoteliers with the capability to respond to reviews, update property details, add photos, etc.) The irony is that PR people have complained that websites such as TripAdvisor.com hamper their ability to control the message when, in fact, it gives PR people a great opportunity to manage a brand and message. By actively participating in a community of consumers, PR people can defend themselves against whiners and complainers who have anomalous experiences with a product or service, or who are just the type of customer no one wants to deal with. As one hotel employee said in response to a review from a complaining customer, "I'm sorry that this person had such an awful experience. We did our best to meet their demands, but some people are just jerks." This response actually caused other customers to come to the defense of the hotel in question. While my mini-vacation was nice, I need a real vacation at some point. As such, I spent the past few weeks planning a trip to a friend's wedding out west. Since my hotel is covered by a hotel points program, I've turned my attention to finding good restaurants and the boards on Chowhound.com. I want to take my friend and her soon-to-be husband out for a nice meal, so I want to make sure everything is perfect. After reading hundreds of comments from customers, I narrowed my choices down to three restaurants. I emailed all three with some questions and mentioned that it was a special occasion. Two restaurants responded via email with boilerplate answers. I had not heard from the third when the phone rang the other day. The restaurant's owner called not just to answer my questions, but to offer up some advice and some wonderful perks. He suggested I take my friends for drinks before dinner to a nice lounge near my hotel that is owned by his friend. ("I'll tell him you're coming and that it's a special occasion," the restaurateur told me.) He also said that he would send a car to pick us up for dinner and return us to my hotel via a scenic route. Last, he told me about a special tasting menu that could be prepared for my party. By the time he was done talking to me, I had expanded my reservation from three people to eight and booked a lunch date with the owner two days prior to dinner. Why was this restaurant's owner so different than the people at the other restaurants? Because he worked in the PR industry for almost 20 years before opening his dream restaurant five years ago. We'll be discussing this over lunch in August. I know from my friends in the business that running any kind of hospitality enterprise is difficult. What makes it more difficult is when the business is not proactive about public relations, which sometimes simply amounts to above-and-beyond customer service in the industry. Restaurants, hotels and other hospitality businesses strive to get good reviews from professional reviewers, but they too often ignore getting their message across to the actual customer. The best way for a hospitality business to get hospitable PR is by responding to critics, treating all customers like they're VIPs and controlling the message. You can do this simply by participating in the process that shapes the consumer's view of your business.
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