In the recent years, peer-to-peer reviews have become increasingly important in the hospitality industry, considering that half of travellers will not book a stay before consulting an online review site.
Within the sector of tourist reviews, TripAdvisor emerges as the number one, boasting 50M unique visitors per month and a database of 60M reviews.
Although its importance no longer needs to be demonstrated, it could be interesting to remind how to proactively implement a strategy to ensure the success of your business on this influential “key platform”. In this article, Egluu reviews the main point companies should consider to encourage visitors adding favorable TripAdvisors feedbacks.
- Tripadvisor’s Online Strategy
- In order to be able to manage your listing and ensure all information fields are populated with the right information, it is highly advised to register yourself as the owner of the page. Remember to be true to your brand and to not embellish your story – it is all about managing expectations.
- Set up email alerts to be notified when a new comment has been posted. Real time in marketing communications practices is crucial. When consumers address a request or an issue on brands’ social channels, they expect it to be answered in the following two minutes. Social reactivity is consequently the key to secure consumers’ loyalty.
- Respond to customers’ reviews and engage in conversation with them while adopting a personal approach.
- Don’t ignore the negative feedbacks! It is a popular theory that responding to a complaint online is frequently more rewarding than never having a complaint at all.
- Add a call-to-action on your website by implementing a TripAdvisor hyperlink to encourage customers to provide feedbacks and rate your establishment. Indeed, it exists a correlation between the number of reviews and the % recommendation. This means that more reviews result in a higher recommendation rate.
- Include an overall TripAdvisor visitor rating on your website, demonstrating a relentless emphasis on customer satisfaction.
2. TripAdvisor’s Offline Strategy
- Encouraging TripAdvisor internally consists in educating your staff on the importance of customer’s reviews and customer’s service. Being a tremendous tool toward achieving customer’s satisfaction, TripAdvisor’ feedbacks should be reviewed and discussed during operation meeting with your staff.
- Adopt a personal approach with your customers by taking note of the guests’ name and using it during their stay.
- Reward staff members who continually provide good customer service and those who are positively mentioned in online reviews.
- Incite visitors to write reviews by distributing TripAdvisor comment cards and flyers, which redirect them toward the website they need to go to provide feedbacks. Remember the influence of the number of reviews on the recommendation percentage.
- Implement a guest services department to your staff dedicated at enhancing the overall customer experience by sending out pre-arrivals emails and post-stay messages, answering the feedbacks and issues, etc.
