Don't upgrade Tripadvisor until you see this! 🚀

I wanted to do a video on TripAdvisor and I want to show you what you actually get for your money when you sign up to a Business Advantage listing. The difference between a free one and a paid one, what you get for it or what you don't get and how to properly use it for your website. So the granary is going to be the paid example and the Blacksmith Arms is going to be a free example. Let me start off by showing you what you get from for your listing when you pay TripAdvisor money. So you need to have a presence on there and you need to know exactly what people are looking at and you need to know why you think you should be spending money. End of the day, it comes down to you. Now, why do I do it for the granary? For a number of reasons which I will go over on this video. But I just wanted to show you the difference between free and paid and what you get. The first thing that you get when you have a paid listing is you get the chance to put in your website and your email address on your listing. In my opinion, this is not a positive, not that big of a positive because as you can see here, it is tiny. It's not like they have a nice big massive banner right here saying visit the granary website. They do sort of hide it. And this is what TripAdvisor Pro do and it's not really a beneficial, but it's what you get. Number two, you get to add a special offer. And as you can see here, they took it in here. Again, it's not a massive benefit on this page, but in a second I will show you where it does get beneficial. And number three, one of the benefits of a paid listing is that you get to have your favorite review right at the very top. Again, people say, is this a benefit or is this, is this not a benefit if you can put on your favorite review right at the very top? We all know that people don't go through and look at every single review. They probably would look at the top few of reviews if we're all honest here. Again, people have got a very short attention span. They won't sit on here for hours looking at every review. If anything, what people will do is they will filter it down depending on what they're looking to have in their party. So for example, if it's a couple or a solo, they may break it down. I know a lot of people will just go straight to look at what the terrible is and it will go look at these Reviews, you can't really do anything about it. What I do recommend doing is respond to all of your views, give your side of the story every single time. If you've got a one star or a two star that isn't answered then what that shows the potential guest is that you don't care. So let's go into something very quickly. So this is now a search result for Scarborough area. Now this is where having a paid list and come in to benefit and it will make even more of a benefit when TripAdvisor merge all of their listings, rentals, B&B's hotels, all in one category is that with a special offer. You can only add a special offer if you are paying TripAdvisor money. We know that people like to save or they like to get a special offer so they can filter it down here. So when they do that knocks like 500 properties down to. So only seven people in the whole of Scarborough are taking advantage of the special offer section. So again that is a good way of filtering down 500 to 7 is by utilizing their special offer. So let's go into the back end. So this is the management center. So this is what it looks like when you're a paid member and this is what it looks like it if you're a free member. So as you can see here the difference between the two. So pretty much everything is pretty similar. We've got. You can view pictures, you can do review express, you can manage your listing, you can see analytics. But when you get into the the next bits that's where you see where the difference between the paid and the free. So let's go into analytics which is always good to see. With a, with a free listing you get to see just three of the results. With a, with a paid listing you get to see more analytics. So you get to see how many people are actually visiting your listing, how many people click on your website, how many people have clicked on your special offer, how many people call you, how many people engage with your photos, how many people actually look at your photos and how many people upload pictures. This next section is reserved for the next level of TripAdvisor. So it's something that they've recently put in. I don't subscribe to it purely because I don't see a benefit to this service. If they ever upgrade this and it becomes something that I think would be beneficial, then yeah sure, I'd go for it. Because even if you're spending a £100 with TripAdvisor if you break that down to an annual fee, £100amonth. I can see clearly that from direct referral clicks, which means people clicking on our website, people clicking on our special offers. If I just get one person to sign up or to come and book with me directly on our website via TripAdvisor search, then that pays for, for three months of a TripAdvisor business listing. So if I get only three bookings in a year, and I know that we get more than 30 easily just from the asking people, then it's a return of investment and it's a heavy return of investment. Even if we're paying 2,000, I'd still be seeing a return on investment. And that's because, number one, I take full advantage of the special offer. Number two, we encourage guests to not only leave reviews, but also add people pictures to our TripAdvisor page. TripAdvisor helps you boost your rankings depending on pictures being uploaded, the amount of reviews, the quality of the reviews and your quality of the reviewer. Now, our ranking is going to be heavily affected very soon when we get put into everything hotels and rentals. But you know, even when we are, I know that we're going to still get seen by a lot of people because of the special offer we're going to see by a lot of people because of our sponsored listed placement. And if you want to get more information on sponsored listing placements, please watch that video on the training site because that will give you a little bit more of an insight on that as well. Now another feature that you can do when you are a paid listing is that you get the sponsored ads. We've already gone through that you can also, which you don't need to do if you're a paid, so if you're a free listing, you can do instant booking. Now instant booking is where you link up your property management system, so your siteminder, your Avivo, et cetera to TripAdvisor. So when people do a search result and you come up here, as you can see someone will put in their dates and on the left hand side all the OTAs are involved, but you can also get your official website in here as well. So when people click on that, they won't go through to booking.com they won't go through to Expedia, they'll go through to my site which is a, which is a direct booking and this is what is called TripConnect and it's basically a cost per click campaign. So as you can see here over the last say five, three Months we've been doing cost per click and it's brought in 75 clicks and we've spent £55 roughly. But we've had over 100 clicks on mobile and desktop through to our website. On the back of it, you can set your daily budget so you can do an ad spend daily of 20 pound. But like I say, you only get charged per click. So we've only, even though our daily budget is 20 pound, we've only actually spent nearly 55 pound over that course of the time. As you can see here, daily clicks are around about two to three pounds or even one pound depending on the day. Again, you will get notifications and it is a good feature. So basically the way that this works when somebody comes onto your listing. Now if I was to go on to the Blacksmiths, somebody comes on here and let's just put some dates in for October for two adults. Now, as you can see, the actual website is invisible. So the only ones that are going to be booking is going to be via an ota. So even though the Blacksmith Arms are number one in the local area for their property, when people are coming onto their site again, we're talking about here where people have got a low attention span, less than 5 seconds. Instead of now thinking, okay, I'm going to go now do a Google search and going to go book of them directly. Lowest prices for your stay. They're going to just click on there, see that? That's the best price. And this is what's called a metasearch. This is why Trivago is so important. They click on there and they're not going to go through to the website, they're going to go through to booking.com and booking.com are so good at this is that as soon as you land on their site, only three rooms left, breakfast included. Somebody has just booked last four hours ago, great reviews, blah, blah, blah. See our last available rooms. Guess what? They're going to get booking on booking.com because of the mousetrap effect. So one of the good reasons why to use TripAdvisor is, is to get involved in their TripConnect plan, which is their cost per click. And then you can do what the granary is doing here by getting your official website in here. And that takes everything from my free to book. So my rates go into there and I make sure that I'm beating these all the time with my special offer rates. They click through to here, they go through to my site and again once they go onto my website, it is all down to how good my mousetrap is, which I know free to book now. And Avivo have really good ways of saying to people, listen, once you go through to here, I'll click through, I will pay that cost per click for you guys watching this. So they come through to this section now and what they will see is free cancellation before here, one room selected by booking direct. You just got the best price. So that's their mousetrap coming into play, which is great. So I'm going to keep them sucked up booking and they're more likely to go through and reserve. Now, by doing this, we have had our direct bookings on our website go up and up and up. So a potential 200, 300 pound booking and I've just spent a pound for that cost per click, you come into the effect here. So if they do go and book and we pay, we're very lucky with TripAdvisor. We've been with them for years, so we only pay £700 a year. So I just need to get three of these bookings coming in and then that's the return of our investment. That's just two nights. Now, normally if they spend three or four nights, we just need a couple of those bookings a year. So the reason why you see so many people sign up to TripAdvisor business listing and they cancel it because they say they didn't get anything from it, it is purely because they are not taking the full advantage of the tools that are given to them. You do the cost per click, you use special offer and it can work as long as you've got good pitches and good reviews, a number of reviews. They don't all have to be good. Like, look at that. We've got plenty of bad reviews, but we counterbalance that with responding to reviews and getting good ones as well. Now, the final tool that you can use, which you don't have to be a paid TripAdvisor member for, this is called instant booking. Now, this is free. Now, the way that this works and again, I'll go in via the Blacksmiths because they haven't signed up to it. So you go to products, you go to instant booking. So TripAdvisor gets tricky and confusing because they've got so many different names for so many different things. So what I just showed you was the TripAdvisor cost, Trip Connect, cost per click. The business advantage is the paid listing. Now, the other one that they've decided to bring out is instant booking. So own the guest relationship, no risk. Simple pay for stays, commission model, no commitment and no upfront investment. So you go on to there, you click check availability. It will just make sure that your booking engine matches up to theirs. And it's simple. They will charge you 12 to 15% for every booking that comes via their website. Click. So that is if you see it there, that's TripAdvisor. I do everything with TripAdvisor. I want to, I want to cover all bases. So if someone clicks on there, they come onto the site, they click on TripAdvisor book via TripAdvisor, they click on here, and this booking goes through. It will sync up to my free to book site. And what I will do is it will show up on free to book as when you're looking on bookings that are coming in, which is here, and you're looking at the bookings that have, have come in, then it will just say TripAdvisor in this section here. So booking.com, your website telephone, it will simply say TripAdvisor. And then you will get charged 12 to 15% commission with them. Now, before you're thinking, well, doesn't that make them an ota? Why would I do that? The difference is, and it's like it said in its sales spiel up here, you own the guest relationship, so you get their real email, you get their real phone number. You know, they book via you. So it's not like booking.com where you get a fake email address or a, you know, a masked email address, as we call it. You get their real email so you can communicate with them from the start. And that is why that is a good feature to have, even if you're just a free, free listing. The trick would be then is to make sure that your rate is never beaten by booking.com or Expedia. That's the end of this video. This shows you the pros and cons and the difference between a paid and a free listing. What I would recommend, if you want to find out more about instant booking, watch the next video that I'm going to do, which shows you how to make sure that you never get beaten by these guys in that listing.