We were very interested to see an MSNBC article on how hotels are embracing online customer reviews. It matches our own experience, as our reviewing solutions are proving a major hit with businesses in the hospitality and travel sectors everywhere. We have seen a string of deployments in UK, Ireland, France and the US in recent months.

As part of this growth, we’re delighted to announce that we have have just gone live with the Dalata Group’s 11 Maldron and 14 partner hotels in Ireland.

Last year’s Hotel Website Marketing Conference was a superb event. I spoke on the value of customer reviews but I learned 10x that from the other speakers on all of the online marketing (and other) challenges/opportunities being faced by hotels.

Ciarán and the team have outdone themselves this year with the speaker line-up. As we just couldn’t miss it, we’ve decided to exhibit there too. Keep an eye out for the LouderVoice stand and pop over for a chat. We can tell you how these businesses and others in the the hospitality industry are benefiting from customer reviews and how your hotel could too.

The hospitality industry is a big focus for LouderVoice at the moment. Hotels have long led the way in their use of technology to grow sales and build stronger relationships with their customers.

West Cork Hotel is based in Skibbereen in Co Cork and has been doing an amazing job with revamping every aspect of the business and then getting that message out to the world through Facebook and Twitter.

Yesterday I attended the excellent Hotel Website Marketing event in Dublin organised by Proactiv Marketing. It was a real highlight of 2009 for me with fantastic speaker after fantastic speaker. I walked away with a ton of to-dos for LouderVoice.

I spoke on the benefit of on-site customer reviews for hotels. The core message was that you can grow on-site sales, reduce online ad spend and improve your customer service by adding reviews to your site.

It’s always a pleasure to meet like-minded people who understand the power of online reviews for businesses. Pat O’Neill of HotelConsult is one of those people and we’re thrilled to be working with him in the hotel space.

In these difficult times for hotels, any advantage that they can gain is worthwhile. On-site reviews are a proven way of growing sales and on-site sales for hotels means they improve their margin.