4 Hospitality Automation Tools for Forward-Thinking Profis
Published on February 27, 2023by BotsterAre you working in the hotel business seeking to automate your workflow? I’m here to get you started with automation in hospitality industry! Arm yourself with some leading-edge automation tools that will facilitate your work once and for all.
Read this step-by-step tutorial and learn:
- How to use automation in the hospitality industry
- How to quickly scan your competitors’ prices
- How to scrape hundreds of hotel visitor reviews from Google Maps, TripAdvisor and Booking.com
- How to interpret the results
- How to improve your hotel’s rating based on the visitor reviews
- How to select the automation tool that will work best for you!
Let’s imagine that you are a hotel manager and you need to monitor and level up your hotel’s rating. There’s no better way to do this than by analyzing your competitors’ pricing and your visitors’ reviews! This valuable information will give you insights into developing a competitive pricing and improving your hotel services.
I have a smart tool for scraping hotel prices and three tools (and I’m planning on more!) that extract hotel visitor reviews. I’ll describe each of these bots briefly, and it’s up to you to choose which one you like best!
Hospitality automation tool for quick price scanning
The moment you make a mistake in pricing, you're eating into your reputation or your profits (© Katherine Paine). A surefire way to avoid fatal pricing mistakes is to monitor your competitors’ fees on a regular basis and to make sure your pricing always stays attractive to hotel visitors.
Browsing dozens of hotel sites is pretty tiresome! It sometimes makes you think of hiring a special person for price scanning. Automation in the hospitality industry is here to bring you a huge relief - instead of hiring a person, launch a price scanning bot!
The bot that I’m talking about is called the Booking Hotel Extractor. It exports accommodation prices and other hotel data from Booking.com into a convenient spreadsheet that is easy to analyze. Another advantage of this bot is that it can automatically send you hotel price updates on a regular basis.
Excited? Then read a short guide on how to launch this bot:
- Open Booking.com.
- Find your competitors on Booking.com by selecting the necessary filters.
As an example, let’s extract competitors for the Hotel California - such a lovely place, such a lovely face 🎵 🤭 A hotel with such a name is located in Palo Alto, California, has 2 stars, and is located within 3 kilometers from the center of Palo Alto. Let’s select these basic filters on Booking.com:
- Once the filters are applied, copy the Booking.com search results link in the address bar (you’ll need this link later):
- Create a free account on Botster:
- Open the Booking Hotel Extractor’s start page:
- Name your job:
- Select how many hotels you would like to scan for prices.
Since Booking.com has found only 20 competitors for Hotel California, we can set the bot to scrape the minimal number of hotels (which is 25):
- Paste your Booking.com search results link into a special field:
- Enable regular price scanning if necessary:
Once you’ve ticked the checkbox, the available options will appear. You can set the Booking Hotel Extractor to scrape updated hotel prices:
- every day
- once a week
- twice a week
If no longer needed, the job can be stopped either manually or at a certain date specified in advance:
- Set up notifications:
- Start the bot!
Video guide
Watch me explain how the Booking Hotel Extractor works in detail:
Results and tips
The resulting table includes hotel names and prices:
Here’s the full list of the data extracted by the Booking Hotel Extractor (apart from the prices):
- Full URL
- Hotel URL
- Image URL
- Name
- Description
- Stars
- Price
- Type
- Address
- Reviews
- Popular facilities
- Grade
- Grade - Facilities
- Grade - Cleanliness
- Grade - Comfort
- Grade - Value for money
- Grade - Location
- Grade - Free Wi-Fi
- Grade - Staff
What you can do:
- Sort the table ascending by ‘Price’ to find out the lowest accommodation fees available:
Coronet Motel offers the cheapest accommodation for $99 (I wouldn’t call it cheap, though 🤔).
- Sort the table descending by ‘Price’ to find out the highest accommodation prices available:
Menlo Park Studio is the most expensive hotel in the area.
- Compare the prices offered by Hotel California with the prices of other Palo Alto hotels in the same niche. Decide if you would like to provide accommodation for about $99, or for about $214, or somewhere in the middle.
- Set the Booking Hotel Extractor to monitor your competitors’ prices periodically. Regularly adjust your fees to the fluctuating market prices.
- Apart from price comparison, the Booking Hotel Extractor offers plentiful opportunities for non-stop travel lead generation - check them out here!
Monitoring hotel reviews - automation and technology in hospitality industry
Intelligent automation - hospitality reviews exported from GOOGLE
Another time-consuming task for a hotel manager is to monitor hotel ratings.
If their stay in a hotel was an unpleasant one, tourists often write negative Google reviews to let off steam! 😤 However, in their complaints you can find more valuable information than anywhere else. Negative reviews will allow you to easily find out your hotel’s low points and improve them, thus leveling up your rating and attracting more guests.
While reading unstructured reviews on Google Maps may be counter-productive, analyzing them in an easily sortable table has many advantages. This is where the benefits of automation in hospitality industry come into place!
The bot that is capable of extracting reviews about hotels (and other places) from Google Maps into a convenient table is called the Google Review Extractor. Here’s a short guide on how to use it:
- Open the Google Review Extractor’s start page.
- Select the desired location.
Let’s go on with the Hotel California. It is located in Palo Alto:
- Specify how many reviews you would like to scrape.
The more reviews you scrape - the more valuable information you’ll get. Yet don’t overestimate the time and energy that you are ready to invest in reading other people’s emotionally charged messages! ⚡
- Select sorting preferences.
The bot will sort the reviews accordingly before exporting them. The review type that you tick will come first.
You can sort the extracted reviews as follows:
💬 By relevance (tick this option if you have no sorting preferences)
💬 Newest first (tick this option if you’ve recently made a renovation in your hotel, hired new staff, or introduced any other changes and would like to check how the most recent hotel guests estimate these changes)
💬 Lowest rating first (tick this option if you would like to find out what can be improved in your hotel)
💬 Highest rating first (tick this option if you want to know what visitors like most about your hotel and to maintain this level)
There is always room for perfection, so let’s tick ‘Lowest rating first’ as an example:
- Enter your keywords with locations.
Remember to enter the location together with the keyword:
- Start the bot!
Video tutorial
When it comes to automation, hospitality industry experts like you may need a video guide on how to extract reviews from Google Maps. Here you are:
Results and tips
The resulting table contains user reviews about Hotel California, with the lowest-rating reviews coming first:
What you can do:
- Read negative reviews and solve the problems mentioned by hotel guests. For example, one of the reviewers wrote: “It’s an old run-down low-income housing”. Time to renovate the rooms!
- Automation in hospitality industry allows you to check if the hotel administration has reacted to the discontented hotel guests’ testimonials by reading the ‘Owner’s answer’ column. If the cells are empty, it is advisable to answer the reviewers in a polite manner. This is an easy yet effective way to improve your hotel’s perception and reputation!
On the screenshot below, you can see that the owners of Hotel California haven’t answered anyone yet. That's because they are not aware of all the benefits of automation in hospitality industry!
- Read your competitors’ reviews.
A good idea is to check what people think of other nearby hotels that are your immediate competitors. Analyzing your competitors may give you many insights into the available business growth opportunities. Just insert a competing hotel’s name (with location!) instead of your hotel’s name when setting up the Google Review Extractor.
- Set the Google Review Extractor to run on a regular basis. This bot can work as a hospitality automation tracker and send you notifications about newly appearing negative reviews in the real-time mode. Thus, you will be able to react to them quickly.
To enable regular notifications, do the following:
Tick ‘Run this bot periodically’ on the Google Review Extractor’s start page:
Once you’ve ticked the checkbox, the available options will appear. You can set the bot to run:
- every day
- once a week
- twice a week
Also, you can select an hour when it’s convenient for you to get your alerts. Let’s set the bot to run every day at 7 a.m.:
If you no longer need to monitor your hotel’s reviews, you can stop the job either manually or at a certain date specified in advance:
Now you can respond to newly appearing negative reviews in real-time mode!
TRIPADVISOR service automation in hospitality industry
TripAdvisor is yet another powerful tool for getting insightful information on how your hotel is perceived by the visitors. And the good news is that automation in the hospitality industry is also possible for this aggregator!
You can scrape and analyze TripAdvisor reviews in bulk using the TripAdvisor Reviews Extractor. Here’s how to do this:
- Open your hotel’s page on TripAdvisor and copy the page URL:
- Open the TripAdvisor Reviews Extractor’s start page.
- Paste the URL into a special field:
- Specify how many reviews you would like to scrape.
As written on its TripAdvisor page, Hotel California has 42 reviews, so I’ll tick ‘up to 60’:
- Select the language that the reviews are supposed to be written in.
According to its TripAdvisor page, Hotel California has 41 reviews in English and 1 review in Portuguese. I’ll select English:
- Launch the bot.
Video guide
Watch this quick video walkthrough to understand how the TripAdvisor Reviews Extractor works in detail:
Results and tips
As promised, the resulting spreadsheet contains 41 reviews in English. The most informative columns are probably ‘Title’ and ‘Review text’:
What you can do:
- Sort the table ascending by ‘Rating’:
👎 All negative reviews will automatically move to the top of the table. Take some time to analyze hateful comments like “this could be Heaven or this could be Hell”, “This hotel has a major bedbug infestation” and “Absolutely a total dump” 😮
Don’t wait to eliminate all these defects! The more so if you are using intelligent automation - hospitality specialists never miss the opportunity to find out where there’s room for improvement!
- Sort the table descending by ‘Rating’:
👍 All positive reviews will automatically move to the top of the table. Enjoy reading things like “I loved the roof terrace and kitchen”, “this is an easy, well-located place to stay” and “a friendly, clean and inexpensive hotel in a great location”. Do you also get this nice feeling when somebody praises your work? 😇
Sentiments apart, reading positive reviews also has some practical usage. Make up a list of advantages mentioned by real visitors and add it to your hotel description - not only on your website but also on TripAdvisor, Booking.com and wherever else you’re listed. Speak your customers’ language, and you’ll be sure to win their hearts for your hotel! And in this case, the impact of automation in hospitality industry can hardly be overestimated 💯
- Use the TripAdvisor Reviews Extractor to scrape and analyze reviews about the competing hotels.
- Export Palo Alto hotel URLs from TripAdvisor using the Tripadvisor Search Extractor as described in this post devoted to generating travel leads and to doing advanced travel and hospitality marketing with automation solutions.
- Paste these hotel URLs into a special field on the TripAdvisor Reviews Extractor’s start page.
- Analyze the extracted reviews, get to know your competitors’ high and low points, and beat their hospitality services!
Automation in hospitality industry - examples from BOOKING.COM
Nowadays, virtually all hotels - big and small - are listed on Booking.com. This informative site helps hotels attract tourists and help tourists find the best hotels by reading real reviews about them! Testimonials are a valuable source of information for tourists, and their influence on people’s final choice is enormous.
It’s not a secret that many tourists sort hotels by user rating before making their choice. Some don’t even read reviews due to lack of time and just select the first hotel with the highest rating. If your hotel is in the first position or at least on the first search results page on Booking.com, chances are that tourists will come to you!
But what if it’s not? To occupy the first position, you need to get a 10 from all of your tourists. And to get a 10, you need to know what other guests disliked about your hotel when they gave you, say, a 7 or a 4. Here is where service automation in hospitality industry becomes helpful.
The bot that scrapes Booking.com user reviews is called the Booking.com Hotel Review Scraper. Here’s a short guide on how to launch it:
- Open your hotel’s page on Booking.com and copy its URL.
Hotel California isn’t listed on Booking.com (sadly enough), so let’s analyze its competitor - the picturesque Creekside Inn - and learn from its mistakes:
- Open the Booking.com Hotel Review Scraper’s start page.
- Paste the hotel URL into a special field:
- Launch the bot.
Results and tips
Wow! The Booking.com Hotel Review Scraper has exported all 634 reviews about Creekside Inn in just a few seconds, and that cost me only 25 cents 🙈
This bot’s advantage is that it exports review positives and review negatives in separate columns, making it convenient to analyze them:
What you can do:
- Read ‘Review positives’ of your competitor and think which of the mentioned you can also have in your hotel.
For example, if tourists mention a “great little market on-site with amazing sandwiches” and say that they “liked the filtered water dispenser”, then why not start selling delicious sandwiches and providing filtered water in your hotel? Think about it! ☝️
- Read ‘Review negatives’ and ask yourself: does my hotel also have such a problem? (Be honest when answering this challenging question! 😉)
For example, if tourists complain that the “bed wasn’t the most comfortable” and “there weren't enough pillows and blankets”, maybe it’s worth checking if your hotel is equipped with enough blankets and pillows and if the mattresses are in good condition.
Which hospitality automation tool is the best for YOU?
Now that you are aware of these three automation tools, it’s up to you to decide which one to choose! To spare you the agony of choice, I’ve compared all the three bots in one convenient table:
|
What does this bot export? |
example file | example file | example file |
|
Can scrape data by hotel name? |
yes | no (TripAdvisor link required) |
no |
|
Can sort reviews by rating? |
yes | no | no |
|
Can sort reviews by language? |
no | yes | no |
|
Can scrape hotel owners’ answers? |
yes | no | no |
|
Can scrape the countries that visitors come from? |
no | no | yes |
|
Scrapes negative and positive reviews separately? |
no | no | yes |
|
Can automatically |
yes | no | no |
|
Pricing |
|
|
|
Now you are free to make your choice! And I wish you to become a successful and prosperous hotel manager (or maybe owner - who knows?). If you've got a dream (like a dream to become a hospitable hotel host), chase it, 'cause a dream won't chase you back! (© Cody Johnson)