High-quality customer reviews are essential for all business in the travel sector.
Potential guests are scouring online review platforms to choose where they would like to book accommodation, restaurants and tours.
93% of travellers worldwide saying online reviews influence their booking choices.
Getting more reviews for your business is a vital part of any tour and activity marketing plan.
Your potential guests are relying upon what your past guests are saying online.
Surveys have shown that 80% of travellers would not book accommodation if there were no reviews online.
They are looking for the type of feedback that assures them that your venue is where they will get the experience they want and what they will expect when they arrive.
Reviews Bring You More Business
It’s safe to say that TripAdvisor can play an essential role in building your company’s brand reputation. Where you rank on TripAdvisor reviews can be very important to your business’s success.
TripAdvisor is one of the world’s leading trusted review platforms, with a phenomenal 500 million average monthly users.
Over 7 million businesses are listed on the platform, and it is no longer just holiday accommodation; it also offers many business listings and reviews, including restaurants, cafes, day spas, local drivers, tourist attractions, and many other brick-and-mortar businesses that rely upon tourists coming to the region.
Users of the platform have left over 465 million online reviews.
With the massive number of reviews left on TripAdvisor, customers look at the feedback that past customers have already left about your business. This will influence whether to choose you or the local competition.
Reviews Boost Your Rankings
Trip Advisor also works similarly to Google; it has its own algorithm of what businesses it will display when a search query looked for
Understanding how reviews affect your ranking on TripAdvisor is crucial to know how TripAdvisor’s popularity ranking algorithm works.
It can be broken down into three basic areas:
- More reviews are better than fewer reviews;
- Good reviews are better than bad reviews; and
- Newer reviews are better than older reviews
Did you know that more reviews can help with your Google ranking too?
Suppliers can improve their activity marketing on TripAdvisor by generating more high-quality customer reviews.
How to Get More Reviews For My Business
But “how do I get more TripAdvisor reviews and improve my ranking,” I hear you ask?
Getting TripAdvisor reviews doesn’t have to be a daunting process.
If you do it right, you won’t come off as “pushy” when you ask for a review.
If you’ve provided excellent service and know it, a large percentage of customers will be happy to give your business a positive review, no questions asked.
To help you get those all-important reviews and improve your TripAdvisor rankings, we’ve put together the simple tactics that you can start using right away with little effort:
Further down in this article, we will show smaller businesses how they can keep up with the bigger venues to generate more reviews and keep it low cost and easy.
Now Tripadvisor does offer a free tool called Review Express.
It helps you to request customer reviews via email.
For larger businesses using this tool is effective as they will already have the systems in place.
For a smaller or boutique venue – it is time-consuming to set it up and compliant.
The 3 steps it requires a business to do before you can use it is :
Ensure that the guests have given you the correct contact information
Have your guests permission or consent that you can contact them via email
All personal information about your guests that you have collected must be stored securely and following the Data Protection Act 1998.
When the customer information is entered, you can send the email review request emails, which are a set template that cannot be customised.
You can then track the emails sent, total opens, total clicks, and total reviews.
However, the biggest drawback to using Review Express is its time, especially for smaller businesses. It’s a time-consuming task to upload the information and then make sure it’s all accurate and then backed up.
How To Get Easy Reviews For Your Business
The fastest and simplest way to increase your reviews on TripAdvisor is to simply ask for them and make it easy to leave the review on the spot!
It is frustrating when your guests agree to leave a review, only to walk away and not follow through.
In most cases, this isn’t because your guests are liars or inconsiderate.
The truth is that people forget. Once they are home and their real-life starts again – Leaving a review is the last thing on their minds.
This is where Perfect Review can step in and create a simple system that removes the bottleneck between asking for a review and making it easy for a customer to do it.
With Perfect Review Tap Cards or QR Scan codes, guests can leave reviews on the spot for Tripadvisor PLUS the other review platforms to have set up.
Yes, TripAdvisor reviews are important, but what if you could also get more Google Reviews and Facebook recommendations at the same time?
Imagine if you had new reviews been spread across different platforms coming in for your business every day, and you were able to be proactive in what to suggest to customers while they were writing the review.
It may sound obvious to get reviews on the spot, and it will take a little effort and a little training.
The results will soon quickly speak for themselves, though, and the effort will be totally worth it.
Train Your Staff To Ask For Reviews
Your best staff are customer focus trained and will put their customers’ needs first.
It will seem a little awkward at the start to ask customers for reviews.
But it will soon become a natural part of the overall customer service process.
Do training with your staff can train to ask for reviews from most of the guests they interact with.
Happy guests may not want to help the business per se, but they do want to help out the people they connected with.
They want to help the concierge who remembered their names every time they came into the lobby.
Or the staff member who made sure that their food was ordered correctly when specific requests were made and ensured their dining experience was without any dramas.
Have your staff practice their asking for a review, so it feels personal.
Your happy customers are much more likely to leave a review if they think it will help the staff that helped them.
It feels good to know that you have given a glowing review and mentioning their name to a staff member.
Reviews are helping the staff and employees as well as the business overall.
Great reviews will attract more visitors, giving the staff more work, and the stand out staff will also get recognition when guests mention who it was that looked after them.
Incentivise Your Staff To Get Reviews
There aren’t any rules that stop you from rewarding your employees for getting reviews.
You can even start a challenge for the staff and offer a cash bonus or other reward when a staff member is mentioned in a five-star review.
Please remember, you must follow all of TripAdvisor’s guidelines.
TripAdvisor is very strict about incentives and what is not allowed.
You cannot offer any kind of reward or special treatment for guests to leave a review.
This includes vouchers or discounts of any kind.
Violations will result in the removal of reviews.
Preempt Any Negative Reviews
No matter how good your staff and business is, there will always be a guest who does not expect the experience.
It could be the weather, an extremely busy day with extra waiting times, or a guest with unrealistic expectations.
Whatever the reason, a bad experience doesn’t necessarily mean a negative review on TripAdvisor.
One way to get ahead of negative reviews is to approach them and address them directly proactively.
An apology or a sincere offer to make it suitable for the customer will go a long way.
Besides, negative customer feedback is often one of the best ways to find out where your business can improve. In addition, ignoring negative feedback can make an unhappy guest feel even more neglected, quickly leading to a public review.
Respond To All Reviews Good And Bad
Now and then, a bad review will make it onto your TripAdvisor account.
But this does not have to be a terrible thing.
Negative reviews are a chance to try and rectify what happened to the customer.
It is also the best opportunity to put your customer service skills on show for all the readers reading the review and your response.
Offering an apology and a solution to try and make it suitable for your guest will speak volumes to the potential guests checking you out online.
Let’s face it – Negative reviews are usually read before the positive reviews.
People want to make sure that they will not be duped when they book into a venue.
Tips For Negative Reviews
Here are some tips for responding to bad reviews:
Don’t take it personally.
Take responsibility for your mistakes. If you can show potential customers that you’re willing to own up to a problem (and fix it), they’ll usually have an even better impression of your business.
An apology can go a long way.
Don’t write your response when you’re angry, emotional, or in a bad mood.
Instead, step away for at least an hour, reread your text before posting it, or have a coworker review it for accuracy.
This gives you the chance to cool down and avoid a harsh, defensive or petty response. None of this reflects well on your company.
Plus, a healthy balance of positive and negative reviews can increase customer confidence.
Go get more high-quality customer reviews on TripAdvisor. But remember, at the end of the day, it comes down to asking and making it easy.
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