Are your potential customers reading online reviews before booking a stay at your hotel? Are they ruling out your establishment because of a bad review about poor customer service or a pest sighting? These are the questions that concern hoteliers like you every day as more and more consumers use online reviews to make their purchasing decisions. Orkin recently partnered with national hospitality and linguistic experts to determine the frequency of pests mentioned on hotels review blogs and the impact of these encounters on customer loyalty. Read on for the full results of the study and how you can preserve your hotel's five-star reputation.

Whenever you operate a company with employees, you will have employee-related issues. Those issues can range from employees stealing products to employees fraudulently taking advantage of workers compensation and Family Medical Leave Act programs. Work comp and FMLA fraud can quickly grow out of control and create a loss center for companies in excess of millions of dollars. There are some simple ways to help control this issue. Using these methods, companies can work to prevent work comp and FMLA fraud while also ensuring that they take swift action to prevent abuse once its been identified.

Hotels, restaurants, casinos and resorts are notoriously desirable targets for thieves and con artists, mainly because of the large sums of cash flowing through these businesses. And, indeed, statistics do show that theft and fraud take a serious financial toll on the bottom lines of most hospitality entities. According to industry statistics, as much as 5% of annual food and beverage revenue is lost to fraud by hospitality companies. The good news is that there is a lot that hotel management can do to prevent and detect illegal activity that they're not doing now.

With hybrid cars, energy-saving appliances and recycled products on the rise, the environmentally friendly movement has never been more popular. What many people don't know is that the pest control industry, for several years, has been making its own move toward "greener" alternatives to traditional techniques. But what does this mean for your hotel? It means better pest control results with less risk. Newer techniques and technologies are much more tailored to the biology and behavior of each target pest than treatments in the past. Consequently, they are more effective, virtually unnoticeable to your guests and much less likely to pose health risks. The days of spraying baseboards with pesticides and often malodorous treatments are over.

Summertime and the living is easy by the pool - unless guests are forced to swat pests while they tan. As warm weather brings mosquitoes, flies and stinging pests out in numbers, hoteliers need to prepare themselves to fight back and make sure their guests' relaxing poolside experiences aren't ruined by buzzing insects.

With Labor Day just around the corner, the housekeeping staff soon will scramble to clean rooms and managers will get ready to deal with overbooking woes. And while "walking" guests to another establishment may be a common practice during a busy season, hoteliers should ensure that they're walking guests due to overbooking - not because a regulator or inspector has forced a room closure as the result of a pest infestation. Though pest control is by no means the only area that regulatory inspectors will review, it is an important one. Inspectors will review pest control for the same reasons that hoteliers employ proactive pest management programs - pests can threaten public health, signify greater problems like poor sanitation and cause structural damage. Not to mention that a serious pest problem can lead to claims, additional expense or even a lawsuit from angry customers or negative media coverage.

Hair on the pillow, lipstick on the glass, cockroach in the bathtub. They're three scenarios of which hotel urban legends can be made. But which one bothers guests most? To find the answer to this question, Orkin, Inc. fielded a poll to consumers and hotel insiders to learn their perceptions of housekeeping issues and uncovered some interesting attitudes in the process. When it comes to regular hotel users (i.e., those who spend at least one night a month in a hotel), they may not be the most forgiving lot if their bathroom is dirty: they rated bathroom cleanliness as a top concern, and when asked to select conditions that might cause them not to return to an establishment, more than nine out of every 10 (92 percent) chose "visibly unclean bathtub."

For many of us, the start of a New Year means another list of New Year's resolutions. We set goals and start over fresh, pledging to improve ourselves over the next 365 days. Many hoteliers will make their own New Year's resolutions, from "increase business" to "raise the value of our service." But one thing that can spoil the chances of your hotel achieving these goals is pests. During the winter months, pests can pose a threat as they seek refuge from the harsh outside weather. In fact, some mice will gnaw through holes as small as a dime in search of shelter, food and water. In a recent poll Orkin conducted, 85 percent of regular hotel-goers reported they might never return to an establishment if they saw or heard a mouse. In the summer months, rodent pressure can give way to fly and cockroach infestations, which are also very off-putting to hotel guests.

The problem for hospitality companies, among others, is that thieves have found more and more ways to steal customer credit card and other personal information in order to create counterfeit credit cards in the victim's name.,..or to use the credit card information to fraudulently purchase goods over the Internet with the victim's identity. In addition, restaurant and front desk point-of-sale locations are common "hang-outs" for dishonest employees armed with credit card "skimmers" that record guest credit card data for later use in identity fraud.

Hotel guests weren't the only ones enjoying the unusually mild temperatures this past winter. The warm weather allowed pests to thrive throughout the season, and with such a low pest mortality rate over the last few months, summer is sure to bring even more pest infestations than usual. To keep pests out this spring, take advantage of your hotel's sanitation program as a pest prevention tool.

Despite the constant barrage of news about corporate theft and fraud, there are still far too many situations in which hospitality companies unknowingly pay criminally-minded individuals or phony companies posing as legitimate vendors. How is it possible that "legitimate" companies have a private mailbox at the local UPS Store, a private residence, or even a prison address? Or that invoices a month apart with consecutive numbers both get paid? Or "invoices from a "vendor" whose address happens to match that of a company employee get paid?

Whether it's lounging by the pool, enjoying dinner at a nice restaurant or just relaxing with a good book, your guests' favorite vacation activities can quickly be disrupted with the sound of an annoying "buzz..." Besides serving as a nuisance, flies also pose serious health risks to your guests and staff. Since flies feed on feces and other decaying matter, they can carry up to a half billion bacteria on the outside of their bodies, including E. coli, Salmonella and Staphylococcus. In fact, flies are the No. 1 transmitters of disease in the world.

The news headlines are chock full of accounts of massive volumes of confidential corporate information being stolen, including customer credit card data, medical records, Social Security numbers, corporate trade secrets, trademarked and copyrighted intellectual property and more. The results of these attacks, though hard to accurately measure in dollars and cents, are nonetheless devastating for both the victimized company and the customers, employees and contractors whose personal identifying data is stolen. In the largest theft of confidential information ever, the apparel retailer, TJX Inc., had its databases attacked by outside hackers to the tune of over 45 million retail transaction records, involving countless numbers of credit and debit card files.

As gasoline continues to sell at high prices, humans aren't the only ones seeking alternate ways to travel. While pests may not stick out their thumb and ask for a ride, they can "hitchhike" into hotels in shipments and people's belongings. Pests flock to hotels for numerous reasons, including food, water and shelter. Some hitchhiking pests such as bed bugs come inside in people's belongings, while crawling pests often hide in supply boxes and shipments. Let's take a closer look at each of these pests, including how you can identify them and prevent them from earning a free night's stay.

"Ethics" means doing the right thing every day - even when no one is watching. So you think you're ethical? If you own the company, do you run personal expenses through the company? If you're an executive, do you turn in padded expense reports? If you do, these thefts will inevitably become common knowledge among all of your employees. And employees take their cues about what's acceptable behavior, and what's not, from those above them.