Did you know that 80% of people read at least six reviews before booking a tour or experience?
And, 53% of people won’t even book a tour unless they see reviews.
With more than 760 Million reviews, Tripadvisor is the third most popular review site behind Google and Facebook.
Your guests expect to be able to research and read reviews online before booking a tour or experience with you. If there are no reviews online, that’s a bigger red flag than having negative customer reviews.
With Xola’s integration with Tripadvisor Review Express, you can simplify, automate, and track the customer review process. To get started, all you need is a Tripadvisor business account (It is free to sign-up).
On average, Tripadvisor Review Express users see a 28% lift in customer reviews.
In this post, we’ll walk through some key advantages as well as some pitfalls to avoid.
What’s Tripadvisor Review Express?
Tripadvisor Review Express makes it easy for you to encourage guests to leave a review on your Tripadvisor listing.
Pro Tip: Don’t have a Tripadvisor listing yet? Here is how to claim and manage your Tripadvisor profile.
If you are looking to automate this process further, customize the review emails, or send out private surveys, then you need to Tripadvisor Reputation Pro, which is a paid service.
Get more reviews with less work
Tripadvisor Review Express automatically sends review emails to your customers from the Tripadvisor domain – which delivers additional brand recognition and credibility.
Here are some best practices to maximize the number of reviews you receive.
- Create a short, actionable default review email.
- Choose a “from email address” that’s a real, recognizable person in your company (like a general manager) or something like “Guest Experience Team at Company XYX”.
- If you use an integrated waiver solution, send customer reviews to all guests and not just the person who made the booking.
- Configure your TripAdvisor review settings to ensure that emails go out within 48 hours of the guest’s experience.
- Automatically send a reminder email through TripAdvisor Review Express to any guests who don’t submit an online review one week later.
Get more visibility on Tripadvisor
Just like Google, Tripadvisor is a place where people actively go to search for things to do in a specific city. One of the best ways to improve your Tripadvisor ranking is to get more customer reviews. The two most important review factors are quantity/number of reviews and recency/how often are you receiving new reviews.
Collect additional, private feedback
One of the best advantages of using Tripadvisor Review Express is the ability to send custom messages as well as private survey questions en masse.
This allows you and your team to collect and read constructive suggestions for how to improve your overall guest experience without the risk of it showing up on your TripAdvisor listing page.
Avoid these Tripadvisor review pitfalls
When it comes to online reviews, there are always people who are looking to game the system to generate more positive reviews. This is not recommended with Tripadvisor as they have been known to ban businesses that violate their review policies.
If you want to keep your account in good standing, you should NOT do any of the following:
- Send review emails to people who have never made a booking with your company.
- Ask close friends and family to leave positive reviews
- Bribe customers to leave positive reviews (For example, offering them 50% off their next tour)
- Cherry-pick the customers to send review emails too
- Pay “actors” on Fiverr or other gig marketplace sites to write fake Tripadvisor reviews
How to implement Tripadvisor Review Express with your online booking system
It takes less than two minutes to connect Tripadvisor Review Express with your Xola account. All you need is your Tripadvisor profile URL.
If you are interested in using Tripadvisor Review Express, just log into your account, go to the Xola App Store where you can find Tripadvisor Review Express along with dozens of other Apps and functionality. Then, install the App on your account to get going. You can also check out this step-by-step guide for how to install this app and complete the registration process.
