NB: This is a guest article by Anthony Rawlins, managing director of DigitalVisitor.
Many people rely on TripAdvisor to choose accommodation for their holiday and many businesses incorporate its reviews on their own sites.
In fact, the user review giant receives 50 million users every month.
Bad publicity seems to linger round TripAdvisor, as well as an investigation being carried out by the Advertising Standards Authority over claims it has untrustworthy reviews, so where does this leave hoteliers and property owners who want to provide reviews to potential customers?
One option is collect reviews on your own website.
Some applications are simple plugs-in to any existing website, allowing organisations such as hotels, restaurants and travel organisations, to gather reviews, comments, videos, and photos on their own website.
Not only does this benefit the organisation because it adds inspiring content on their website, drives traffic and builds loyalty, but it also provides potential customers with the user generated content they now want to see before making a purchasing decision.
We are not saying you should exclude Tripadvisor from your marketing strategy, but you should certainly consider other options.
One of the key benefits is that property owners have greater control over moderation. Most onsite review platforms provide the organisation with the ability to approve any reviews before they go live.
This gives you the opportunity to firstly ensure that the review is legitimate, and secondly, it gives you a chance to resolve any serious issues directly with the unhappy customer. It is not a matter of removing bad reviews, but rather, it gives you the opportunity to be pro-active about any issues.
Furthermore, publically responding via your website and under your own brand to an unfavourable review, is more often than not, looked favourably upon by potential customers.
It builds trust and confidence that this is an organisation that cares about their customers, and a high level of trust in a brand, leads to a long-term relationship.
There are of course advantages and disadvantages of each…
TripAdvisor
Benefits:
- It is already an established website receiving 40 million visitors each month, so your brand can be exposed to a huge audience.
- Due to the large amount of traffic, you may gather reviews quicker.
- Reviews on an external website may appear to some as being more honest as they are less likely to be tampered with by the brand.
Disadvantages:
- No control over how the reviews appear.
- Less control over content and moderation – there are many stories online about hoteliers who have contacted TripAdvisor to report a fake or inappropriate review, only to be told “the situation is currently under investigation and a final determination will be made once the investigation is complete. Please allow up to 14 days for this process to be completed” – so in the meantime, the fake review remains online for all to see.
- No ownership of multimedia content uploaded.
- Reviews are appearing alongside reviews from your competitors, so people can easily be drawn away from yours.
- If you want to integrate content from TripAdvisor on your site, some limited options are available for free but other products require a licensing agreement to access which can cost thousands of pounds.
- Limited SEO benefit for your website
Gathering reviews on your website
Benefits:
- More control over where you want the reviews to appear. We believe that reviews, ratings, and discussion shown against relevant products and services on your website will immerse your online visitors amongst your brand and messages. So we have created a range of applications that can be integrated into any page, on any website.
- Full control over moderation enabling you to remove any inappropriate or spammy content.
- You gather relevant information about your customers – and can therefore develop high level, targeted communications.
- The content uploaded is yours to use in future marketing.
- Photos and videos will enhance your website visually.
- Regularly added content will provide SEO benefit for your website
Disadvantages:
- You will need to keep an eye on the content being uploaded, but this should be the case anywhere online!
- Ongoing engagement is required.
- You will need to generate/encourage content. A good way to do this is to ensure a link to wherever your reviews are posted is included in any communications with guests. Read more tips here…
- You may incur a license fee.
- Make sure you check the functionality provided by the platform or applications suits your needs.
To conclude
Reviews are important in the travel industry specifically, 66% of people are influenced by user reviews when searching online, but many travel brands are still wary of enabling reviews on their own website.
Some fear that it will leave their brand open to all kinds of comments, but in this transparent world of marketing, user reviews enable a company to be proactive about improving their products and services.
Reviews on your website give your visitors a reason to stay on your site – according to HotelMarketing.com, between 25-40% of people who leave a hotel website do so to read online review.
So publishing reviews directly on your hotel website fights this loss of traffic, and increases the probability of a direct booking right there on your own website.
NB: This is a guest article by Anthony Rawlins, managing director of Digital Visitor.
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Great post! Thanks!
I have to say that i totally agree that hotels should gather their reviews on their own website.
Best solution is to offer the possibility to guests be able to rate a property whilst they are staying in there.
At eezeer, we offer “white-brand mobile apps” for hotels & hotel chains worldwide.
eezeer’s technology contains built-in features such as:
- Geolocation of the user
- Formatted review questionnaire for Hotels
- Hotel description page including photo gallery
- Simplified Booking options linked to Hotel reservations
For further information, contact us on the website : http://eezeer.com/ or myself directly on karine.paparo@eezeer.com
One thing that seems to be missing from the “Disadvantages” list for the business owner or merchant is the ability to remove negative reviews if you simply don’t agree with the review. That may seem like an advantage to owners (heck, I represent thousands of B&B owners), but in the grand scheme of things, if an owner can remove any negative review he or she wants, then the system isn’t really a review system – it’s more like a list of references on a resume. If a hotelier, innkeeper or restaurant owner can take down any review, doesn’t that undermine the premise of an authentic review system? I think a lot in this review world could be fixed with a solid authentication/verification system that someone stayed at the property. That is missing from TripAdvisor, Yelp, etc. If someone is going to trash a business on a review site, they should have to at least prove they stayed there. Someone could prove they stayed somewhere and still lie about the experience; these sites couldn’t also be lie detectors. People will always find ways around the system, but at least it would cut down on the false negative reviews that so many people write to damage a business. We recently decided to add a review widget to our convention site with a WordPress Plug-In. I’ve told our staff that if someone writes a bad review of their convention experience, that we are to leave it up on the site. http://www.innkeepingshow.com/reviews-of-the-2011-innkeeping-show
One additional, strategic aspect of growing importance: Hoteliers who need to increase the number of direct bookings in the mid- and long-term should take care to generate reviews on their “own” site to secure independance and to avoid mereley applying widgets from review sites that lead the customer away to OTAs in the end.
This might only work for top properties. If you delete bad reviews on your own site, people will complain about censorship.
Another way to do it is to have a handwritten guestbook at the property and then copy a selection of them onto a “reviews” page.
From a customer perspective, the issue with reviews on the hotel’s own website is that they may not be considered as “independent” and may actually be viewed as too biased to be totally accurate – especially if all negative reviews are removed leaving only the glowing ones.
This doesn’t mean hoteliers should not worry about reviews on their own sites … they absolutely should. But if they are all glowing then this will just raise suspicion! As long as the reviews are from “real” guests then a few minor niggles may just support their authenticity … and as you say Anthony, if managed well, responding to reviews is a great way to publically deal with the niggles!
Anyone got any ideas of sites (or available software) that offer this kind of service? Any recommendations?
Hello everyone,
I was just following this interesting post and the comments. Since there was a direct question from Mr. Swaap concerning possible services, I thought I can give you a hint
My company Customer Alliance (www.customer-alliance.com) actually developed a solution to integrate your own content (reviews) directly on your hotel website. We have done this for hundreds of hotels successfully. Furthermore, our service gives you an overview of your reviews throughout multiple review sites. The goal of the service is to increase direct (commission free) bookings and save valuable management time by providing an automated analysis of hotel reviews. Customer Alliance offers a free trial of the service.
Greetings,
Torsten Sabel
Hi Torsten,
I can’t see anywhere on your web site that mentions costs. Could you give us some indicative prices.
Hello Chris,
prices depend on the number of rooms. E.g. a hotel with 60 rooms would pay 69,90 € per month. The goals of our service is, that it finances itself with just one booking more. However, I can send you login information for a free trial, no contract. Do you want to test our service?
Greetings,
Torsten
As hoteliers.com we develop hotel software to increase direct reservations. The own hotel website is the biggest competitor of the OTA and the more functionalities the hotelier offers to enrich the hotel website the better for direct commissionfree sales. We also integrated our software in social media like Facebook, an easy way to create content. Till now we see an increase in the number of direct reservations and time average time spent on the website.
An example hotelwebsite with own review module which can be managed by the hotel itself: http://www.thetimeshotel.nl/index.php?lang=en: click Reviews and http://www.facebook.com/TheTimesHotelAmsterdam: click our reviews
More information: p.brand@hoteliers.com
Hey everyone. Just launched a Guest Review System for hotels, restaurants and spas today. Lets businesses collect their own reviews on their site. Low cost as well.
Interesting post – I am just starting to use TripAdvisor on my site and I believe it adds value to the user experience, however the news of an investigation concerns me. I’m wondering if there are any other hotel/restaurant review affiliate sites out there.
Really great piece by Anthony. When I’m in end-user mode, I always cross-check reviews on multiple sites starting with the businesses own.
As a service provider to the hospitality industry, we like seeing online buyers become more sophisticated. It should not be a case of either TripAdvisor/GooglePlaces/Yelp/etc or On-Site reviews, it should be both.
In answer to Chris Swaap’s question: Our service, LouderVoice, is used by a wide range of hospitality businesses in UK, Ireland and US (with Spain coming soon). This includes hotels, pubs, the Swansea-Cork Ferry and several holiday aggregator sites. It costs €49/£45 per month and can be used for overall business reviews or as many services as you wish. An important aspect of it for all hospitality businesses is the deep integration with Facebook and Twitter.
A number of the comments here discuss the differences between a true independent review system and a system that allows a hotel to remove or not post negative reviews. GuestBook provides an independent review system that enables hotels to retain guests on their website. See the implementation for Steamboat Grand. On their home page at http://steamboatgrand.com/ they have a link to validated reviews which opens a page with their reviews posted on GuestBook. These reviews are posted by guests who receive post-stay email surveys from an independent company survey vendor and the reviews are posted to our system automatically. The hotel does not have the ability to remove any of the reviews, but is able to comment. Another benefit is that the ratings are more accurate because the ratings are derived from answers to the survey questions.
We work hard at what we do. Which is to satisfy our guests. This leads to good reviews however, most reviews are to be found right here in our guest books. Guests write about their Perpignan accommodation and about the town. Where they eat, what they see, how they got around, car, public transport etc. We then scan these reviews and place them at our site. They are hand written and can not be faked. They can be viewed by guests while here. The hardest part is keeping up with scanning all our great reviews. But it is one way to take control of your reviews. Own them. Be proud of them. And don’t be held hostage by sites with profit driven motives.
Is anyone aware of a means to quasi-automatically feed trip feedback originally entered into a corporate system directly onto one’s TripAdvisor listing page? This is to enable feedback to appear in both places without customers having to enter feedback twice. I gather there’s a way to do the reverse (display TA feedback content on our site) but for a variety of reasons, that doesn’t suit our needs.
Thanks for any input.