What do you like most?
What I like most about MARA is that it has become much more than simply a tool for generating responses to guest reviews. For a multi-property hotel group like Rioca, the real value is having one central platform where we can manage guest feedback across different hotels, identify recurring topics, monitor performance, and maintain a consistent tone of voice while still allowing each property to keep its own personality.
From an operational perspective, MARA saves us a considerable amount of time. Managing reviews manually across several platforms and properties can very quickly become a repetitive and time-consuming process, particularly when you want every guest to receive a thoughtful and personalized answer rather than a generic template. MARA makes this significantly more efficient. The AI-generated responses provide a very strong starting point, and our teams can review and adapt them quickly instead of writing every response from scratch. This allows us to respond more consistently and dedicate more time to actually solving the operational issues behind the reviews.
Another aspect I really appreciate is how easy the platform is to use. This is particularly important in hospitality because the people working with review management are not necessarily data analysts or technology specialists. Hotel teams already have many different systems and operational responsibilities, so a tool like this needs to be intuitive. MARA succeeds very well in making reputation management accessible to different levels of the organization.
For us, however, one of the most interesting parts of MARA is the amount of information that can be extracted from guest feedback. Reviews contain an enormous amount of operational intelligence. Guests constantly tell us what is working and what is not working: room condition, cleanliness, breakfast, staff interaction, check-in experience, maintenance issues, noise, value for money and many other aspects of the stay. When this information is structured properly, it becomes extremely valuable for hotel management.
The AI and reporting capabilities help transform a large number of individual comments into something that management teams can actually work with. Instead of reading hundreds of reviews and trying to remember whether a particular complaint has appeared several times, we can identify patterns and understand which areas deserve attention. This becomes even more useful when managing several hotels, because we can look at individual property performance while also understanding broader trends across the group.
I also appreciate that MARA continues to develop beyond its original core use case. The evolution from mainly assisting with review responses toward deeper review analysis and AI-driven insights is exactly the direction I think a modern reputation management platform should take. The most valuable hospitality technology is not technology that simply automates a task; it is technology that helps teams understand what is happening in their hotels and make better decisions.
The team behind MARA is another major positive point. In our experience, communication has been very open, and they are genuinely interested in understanding how hotel operators use the product and what could make it better. That willingness to listen is extremely valuable because hospitality operations are complex, and some of the best product improvements come from understanding what hotel teams actually need in their day-to-day work.
Overall, MARA combines three things particularly well: ease of use, significant time savings, and increasingly useful operational intelligence. It helps us manage reputation more efficiently today, while at the same time developing toward something that can play a much larger role in how hotels learn from guest feedback. For a hotel group managing several properties, that combination makes the platform extremely valuable.
What do you dislike or think could be improved?
MARA already has access to an incredible amount of information about what guests are experiencing in a hotel. It knows which topics appear repeatedly, whether sentiment around a particular area is improving or deteriorating, and which operational issues are mentioned across many reviews. I think the next step should be for the platform to move from telling hotel teams what happened to actively helping them decide what to do next.
For example, if MARA identifies that complaints about room cleanliness have increased significantly over the last four weeks, I would love the platform not only to show this trend in a report but also to flag it proactively and suggest an action plan. It could identify the most common subtopics, show representative guest comments, compare the trend with the previous period, and recommend concrete areas for the housekeeping team to investigate. The same could apply to breakfast, maintenance, check-in, staff friendliness, noise or any other recurring operational category.
Taking this one step further, I think there is an opportunity for MARA to evolve into a kind of operational intelligence layer for hotels. Instead of hotel managers having to constantly open dashboards and search for insights themselves, MARA could proactively tell them: "This issue is becoming more frequent", "This topic has improved significantly", "This property is performing differently from your other properties", or "These are the three areas that should receive management attention this week."
For smaller and medium-sized hotel groups in particular, this would be extremely valuable. These companies often operate with lean management teams, and managers do not have unlimited time to analyse dashboards and manually translate data into action plans. The technology should ideally do part of that thinking for them.
Another natural evolution would be tighter integration between insights and task management. If the system identifies a recurring problem, ideally it could help create or recommend follow-up actions for the relevant department and later measure whether the intervention actually improved guest sentiment. That would create a very powerful cycle: guest feedback → insight → action → measurement of results.
I see this less as a weakness of the current product and more as the biggest opportunity for its next stage of development. MARA already does an excellent job of helping hotels manage reviews and understand guest feedback. The opportunity now is to use the intelligence behind all of that data to become even more proactive and operational.
If MARA can continue moving in that direction, I believe it has the potential to become not only one of the best review management platforms in hospitality, but a much broader management tool that helps hotel teams continuously improve their operations based directly on the voice of the guest.
