Why TripAdvisor is so Important for Your Hotel Marketing S1E2

Hello and welcome to the Boost Hospitality podcast. My name is Mark Simpson and I'm going to be your host. Our aim is to help you increase your direct bookings and to get more heads on beds. We're going to give you simple yet effective tools that you can put into place right now for your hotel, guest house or self let accommodation property. To find out more information or to see the show notes, go to www.boostly.co do podcast. Okay, let's get on with the show. Okay, in this episode we are going to talk about TripAdvisor. This is part two of the top five tips on how to boost your direct bookings. TripAdvisor, as you all will know, is a very, very popular tool tool not only for hotel owners, but for consumers. 77% of all holiday goers will go to TripAdvisor before completing a booking on a property. So if we put that into Layman's terms, nearly 8 out of 10 of your guests right now came to look at your property before completing that booking, which is phenomenal. You know, it's such a very powerful tool. Reviews can either make or break you. So what we're going to go through, we're going to go through TripAdvisor, break it down and I'll show you exactly what you can be doing that so many people aren't doing. Very simple tips that you can do right now that will help you get more bookings. And this has been tried and tested by myself and plenty of our clients. So number one, what we're going to do is we are going to make sure that you respond to reviews. So right now look at your TripAdvisor page. There may be one review, there may be 10 reviews or maybe 100 reviews that are sitting there. Now if you don't respond as in a managerial respond, then you are putting off potential bookers. The stats and the surveys have shown that managers or hotels which are social and responsive on their TripAdvisor page, they get more bookings. Do consumers like it? People like to see that you're dealing with a complaint or just even acknowledging someone who has left a review. So now look at how many reviews you've responded to. Do you only respond to the negative ones? Do you only respond to the positive ones? How are you responding? Is it just a two word response? Is it an essay? You know, this is really important and a really key part of how to increase your bookings. So if out of all the points this is the only one that you listen to, make sure this is the One, when you respond to a guest review, it's really important that you add the personal touch. Now, it doesn't mean that you have to go on a massive long essay, you know, 50 to 100 words will do every time. If it's a guest that's complimenting you, saying something very nice, pick up on that, respond to it, add a bit of a personal social level. The what will set you apart from other places that maybe don't put on a personal view to their guests is in this review section. So if someone has commented on the toilet being broken or someone has commented on an issue that is easily fixable and you've fixed it, make sure you save that. Just say, thanks so much for the review. We really appreciate your feedback. Just to let you know that broken toilet has been fixed. So a potential booker, when you're looking on your TripAdvisor page, they are checking out your managerial response. They are looking at the review and they're looking at what you've got to say if they're looking to see that. If you are someone who fixes problems or just leaves them. So when you do come to respond, bear that in mind. Most importantly, respond to every review. You know, it doesn't have to be a task that takes forever. You know, you can set an hour aside a week, or you can do it on a monthly basis. Whatever's the easiest method and the easiest way to work with you at your property. Make, make sure you respond to every review. So right now, go to your TripAdvisor page, open the page up, have a look at it. If you've not responded to a review, this is what I really want you to start doing. Get into the habit of doing it maybe once a week, once a month, but really investing a little bit of time into TripAdvisor because it is so important. So you may be sat there and you may have one review, you may just have a few reviews and you're thinking, how do I get more? The simple question is ask. Ask your current guests to leave a review on your TripAdvisor page. They can either do it in the car on the way home on their mobile phones, they can do it when they get home on the laptop. TripAdvisor made it so simple. Now that a consumer or a guest can leave a review on their platform on, you know, doesn't matter where you are in the world. So here's what you can do at checkout when the guests are leaving, have a little card, like a business card have on it where they can Leave a review on your TripAdvisor page. If you're tech savvy, maybe create a QR code so they can scan it on their phone and it goes straight to your TripAdvisor page. Email. After a guest has left, send them a quick email. Put a personal message on it. Just say, thank you so much for coming to stay with us. We hope you had a good time. We'd love to get your feedback and then give them a link to your TripAdvisor page. Really important here. What we're trying to get at is try not to make the guest have to find your page. Give them a direct link so they can click a button and they go straight onto the page or where they can leave a guest review. Lastly, asking for feedback, give them a text. If you've got the mobile number and if you're using text to correspond with your guest, send them a text message. Again, ask them if they can leave a review on your TripAdvisor page. Really important. Again, make sure you give them the direct link. Now, why text? You may be thinking, well, a guest, you can give them a checkout card. They may lose it in the car on the way back. Emails can go missing. They sometimes can go to spam. Nobody misses a text message. When you see send a text, it goes straight in on their phone right at the top. The little notification comes up and it will not go until they have actually acknowledged and opened that text message. So those are three options. Checkout cards, email and text messaging. So we've got the reviews now. We're responding to them now. This is the next important thing. Don't take the reviews that your guests leave you personally. Try and look at it as a feedback form. The problem is with a lot of hospitality owners is that the reviews that they receive, they can take it personally. They don't like to be told when they're doing something wrong. TripAdvisor, you just got to look at it from a purely business level. Out of 100 reviews, if you've got one person who is commenting on maybe the carpets or the decor or the bedding, brush it off, that's one out of 100. You've got 99 people who are satisfied. If you're looking at it and there's 40 or 50 people complaining about a certain thing out of 100 reviews. But it's, you know that you need to fix it. So it's really important to get your mindset into the right level for this. Don't look at a review and try and take it Personally, like they're having a slate against you as a person. Try and look at it from the aspect of a business aspect is that you have got, your guests are giving you live feedback on what you're doing well, what you're not doing well and what you can improve. At the end of the day, if you can improve and if you can fix those issues, then you're on the right track. So we've looked at responding to reviews, we've looked at how to ask for reviews and we've looked at why you should not be looking to take them personally. Finally, with TripAdvisor, there's a section called the business listing. So this is part of their paid service. So 90% of TripAdvisor is free and it's very useful. The paid option is something you should definitely be looking at if you get a lot of your guests and when you ask them how did they find you, if a lot of them are saying TripAdvisor, then you should be focusing down and basically hammering down on TripAdvisor and looking at how you can get more out of it. And business listing is one of those. It's not for everybody. It can be quite expensive for an initial outlay, but the return of investment is huge. For a 700 to a 1000 pound investment, that could just be 10 bookings from five bookings depending on your prices. Five to 10 bookings and you've already had a return on your investment. Why is it beneficial? Well, one, in your listing you'll be able to add a link to your website again, increasing your direct bookings. There will be a telephone number, but not any normal telephone number. This is a masked telephone number. So for example, it will be a different telephone number to yours, but when dialed, it will link straight to your landline. So when called, TripAdvisor will call and track it to make sure and just to let you know how effective their advert is doing. Thirdly, they will give you an option to put in a special offer. Again, a great way to increase direct bookings. So in there you could put a free welcome drink. When booked directly via TripAdvisor, it could be a discount. Anything that you want to put in there, you can. Now, before you decide whether a business listing is for you, here's what I recommend. Go onto the front page of TripAdvisor, look in your town, type in your hometown, your city, and have a look to see how many people are taking advantage of the business listing. You can easily do so by doing a search. So for example, hotels in your area and on the top there'll be tabs. Go to the special offer section, count how many vouchers you can see in there. If it's less than 30 and you're in a proper in a town or a city that's got hundreds of other competitors, it is definitely worthwhile to invest in. A sponsored listing is a listing that will sit at the top of every search result. So if your ranking is anywhere below the top 10, you can get bumped to the top of the page and it'll be on a rotational basis. So if for example, in your town, if there's only 10 other people who are on a business listing and there's 400 properties in competition with you and you're in the top 50, I would definitely look at investing into the TripAdvisor business listing because you're the easy way to get bumped to the top to get more visibility. Don't forget, when somebody is looking for a holiday, 77% of guests will go and check reviews. If you can get your property in their eye line, it'll give you a leaps and a head start above everybody else in increasing your direct bookings. At the end of every podcast I like to give you a little tip or a trick that you can do right now to go away straight after this podcast and put into practice. So today's is I want you to go to your TripAdvisor page and I want you to respond and manage your response to the last 10 reviews. Go do that. Let me know how you get on screenshot it if you like, email a copy to me mark boostly.co.uk B O O S T L Y. That's how you spell boostly. I'd love to see how you get on. As always, please send your feedback. You can catch us on Twitter ostleyuk. Email markly.co.uk Let me know how you get on. Let me know your thoughts on this podcast. And as always, if you could just go to itunes and leave a five star review that I be much appreciated. Thank you.