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Casinos, Bloggers and Consumer Choice
By David G. Schwartz

Once upon a time, professional critics — people who wrote about restaurants for the local paper or penned blurbs for travel guides — held hospitality executives in their thrall. These privileged few opinion-makers had the power to make or destroy hotels and restaurants. Today, getting good reviews is still important, but instead of pleasing a few credentialed experts, resorts have to accept that with the advent of the Internet, everyone is a critic.

The biggest problem in making decisions about where to stay, eat or gamble is a lack of good information. Potential visitors just don’t know enough about the places they are headed to. The only foolproof way to learn about the relative worth of different choices is to experience them firsthand. That might be feasible when shopping around for the best prices at local supermarkets, but vacationers don’t have the luxury of that kind of trial-and-error process. On vacation, time is the most precious commodity — more valuable, even, than money.

That’s because vacation time is finite. There are only so many dinners, for example, to be had during a three-day stay (one would imagine three, but some gourmands may get creative about this). So instead of wasting one potentially outstanding dinner on a random dud, tourists usually do a little research.[Note: This is, of course, more important for destination resorts than it is for local markets, because time — though still finite — isn’t quite so sparse a commodity for frequent-return customers. Since they are more likely to be guided in their choices by convenience and habit, it’s not likely that negative external reviews would be much of a factor in continuing visitation.]

The general phenomenon of searching for advance information is as old as commerce itself. Whether by listening to “word-of-mouth” or searching out expert opinions, consumers have long turned to outside advice on where to shop, eat and stay.

The Rise of the Reviewer
The Internet has sped up and digitalized this traditional process. With reviews, reminiscences and rants on a variety of goods and services, it’s hard to say that you didn’t have the opportunity to know better before making a purchase.

There are particularly valuable resources online for those traveling to destination casinos, and these resources are updated far more quickly than the publication cycle of the average guidebook. Even a book published this year was researched two years ago, which means that any information on the hottest nightclubs is long out of date. With the rapid pace of change in casinos, particularly on the Las Vegas Strip, the Internet is an ideal place to comparison shop.

The problem facing consumers is that there is just too much opinion out there. Tripadvisor.com, one of the better-known travel sites, features “traveler reviews” with, apparently, no editing for content, spelling or grammar. The results are instructive.

The top review for the number one Las Vegas hotel on the site’s popularity index advises that the hotel is the “Biggest rip off in Vegas — And there are a few.” But before choosing to stay away, a potential guest could scroll down to the third review, headlined “Bar-none the best hotel in Vegas.”
But there’s a problem. These two reviews were posted within three days of each other. Both guests stayed at the same property, yet one hated it while the other loved it. Whom­­­­­­ to believe? Luckily, there were a total of 629 customer reviews for that hotel, so it was easy to see that the good far outweighed the bad.

Furthermore, clicking on a reviewer’s name takes the reader to a page with all of his other reviews. So we can see whether he’s a terminal optimist who never gives fewer than five stars or an impossible-to-please fussbudget who would complain about ice on a Vegas summer afternoon.

These online reviews are unmediated word-of-mouth, delivered directly to the customer from the customer. That’s a scary proposition for those in the hospitality business, because customers are far more likely to write a complaint letter than one filled with gratitude … or are they?

If that letter only gets read by hotel functionaries, the answer is yes. Customers have a great reason to complain: the possibility of getting a freebie. But they have little reason to write a complimentary note out of gratitude — that’s gratitude for a staff that they’ll probably never see again, and gratitude that fades as their plane carries them back home.

Posting a review online is a cat with different stripes. Internet reviewers have something that letter-writers don’t: an audience. Why post spurious or made-up quibbles with a hotel that otherwise has excellent reviews? It only makes you look out of step. But you’ve got every incentive to give a balanced review, because you can actually help people. There’s no direct monetary pay-off, but there is a definite ego boost. By telling it like it is, you can become a star reviewer.

This is why it’s absolutely crucial that casino managers repeat — to the point of compulsion — the importance of customer service to their line employees. Every customer should be considered a hospitality columnist with an audience of millions. This attention to service will pay dividends that far outweigh the investment, since a kind word and honest smile can do much to smooth the difficulties that even the best hotel or casino faces.

The Rise of the Blogger
Complicating the rise of the reviewer is a related development: the rise of the blogger. Bloggers (who share their thoughts on Internet weblogs, if you didn’t know) usually fall somewhere between amateur enthusiasts and credentialed experts. Expert status is relative to the field. Someone who spouts crackpot conspiracy theories is not going to be taken with the same seriousness as a longtime professional commentator in the political world, but it’s hard to say where expertise in the hospitality world comes from. Is someone who has stayed as a paying customer at every hotel on the Strip more of an authority on Las Vegas hotels than someone with a Ph.D. from the School of Hotel Administration at Cornell University? In many respects, yes.

There are several bloggers who write about casinos. Some focus on casino design and the larger resort experience, while others keep close tabs on the gaming side — who’s got the most full-pay Video Poker and where the best promotions are. With comments enabled, blogging can become a conversation, with posters questioning or clarifying the original post and the blogger responding.

It would be a mistake for executives to read too much into the posts of a single disgruntled commenter, but blogs are one of the best customer feedback tools available. They are also a way for casino marketers to speak directly to potential guests. This should never be done by spamming comment boxes with promotional offers, but rather by joining the conversation.

Let’s say a blogger says she likes a casino called the Double Deuce. A commenter jumps on the thread and says that it’s the biggest dump in the area, and that he wouldn’t be caught dead there. What’s to stop a junior marketing executive from replying courteously to that comment, or even offering the commenter a discounted stay, in this public forum? This puts the onus of proving bad faith on the commenter and makes the casino looks favorable no matter what the reasons behind the commenter’s original dissatisfaction.

Everyday, people are talking about your property online, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. Some of them are misinformed, and some may have arcane grudges with little lucid basis. Smart operators will monitor and, where appropriate, respond to the blogosphere.

Heeding New Media
Not everyone accepts that the nature of information sharing has changed. A few months ago, Planet Hollywood held its grand opening. A reporter covering the story for a high-profile newspaper asked a well-known Vegas hotel blogger, Hunter Hillegas of RateVegas.com, for his opinion of the resort — a valid question, given that Hillegas runs a website whose very purpose is to share current information about the latest trends in Strip hospitality.

When Hillegas was quoted in the article as saying that he was not completely impressed with the property’s ambience, Planet Hollywood Co-Chair Robert Earl exploded, excoriating the reporter, Steve Friess. Friess, who is also a blogger, mentioned the tiff in print and online, sparking a brief round of blog posts, comments and rebuttals.

Some, like Earl, disagreed with Hillegas’ opinion, and this could have been an overall positive for the casino. But Earl wasn’t content to defend his hotel. Instead, he fumed that a major newspaper treated “some kid from California” like an expert.

Of course, that’s the whole point of the new media: The kid from California (or the granny from Ontario) can be an expert, if he or she can provide thoughtful, well-reasoned analysis. We are living in an online, interactive age, and nothing — nothing — is going to put the genie back in the bottle.

This new age doesn’t demand that company chairpersons and CEOs spend their workdays surfing the web and responding to every blog post concerning their company. But it would be prudent to assign someone in the marketing department as the official “online ambassador.”

Casinos that don’t rise to meet the challenges of the new media will be fine, at first. But as their customers increasingly get their news and opinions online, they’ll be at a tremendous competitive disadvantage to those who proactively foster a positive Internet presence.

David G. Schwartz is the Director of the Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He is the author of several books, including Roll the Bones: The History of Gambling. He can be reached at dgs@unlv.nevada.edu.