TripAdvisor has quickly become the go-to place to research a hotel, restaurant or other hospitality business. People use it to get honest feedback from others on their experiences with a business and use the information on the site to help make their own choices. But as a business, how do you manage your TripAdvisor reviews?
Why be on TripAdvisor?
If you haven’t already joined TripAdvisor, there are some strong reasons to do so. It is the world’s largest travel review website and there are approaching 400 million reviews and opinions from people around the world. There are over 6 million businesses with a presence on it and 135,000 destinations covered.
Not only that, but it is free to use. This means free word of mouth marketing and a free way for customers to leave feedback for your business. It creates free inbound links to your business website to help boost its search engine profile and ensures your business is viewed and honest and transparent because you can’t control the reviews that are left.
Getting started
It is easy to join TripAdvisor for your business – simply create a personal account then search for your business name. There is a ‘find and claim your listing’ page that lets you either claim your business or set it up. Once you have done this, you can update details to make sure all the business information is accurate.
With your business profile set up, you next want to go to the ‘manage listing’ section where you can add images. Keep them to 150 x 200 pixels in size otherwise they can cause loading problems. Sometimes it takes a couple of days for these to appear.
Manage and respond to reviews
Setting up the business is the first step, but the most crucial part of TripAdvisor is managing and responding to reviews. This is easy to do through the ‘respond to reviews’ section on your account. You cannot delete reviews, but you can respond to them, whether they are good or bad.
In fact, responding to reviews is one of the most important parts of TripAdvisor, especially if they are negative. One study shows consumers are 45% more likely to visit a business if it responds to a negative review than if they don’t – so ignoring something bad isn’t a good approach.
Therefore, responding to reviews, both good and bad, is something you should schedule in to do on a regular basis. You can easily respond to reviews by using the left-hand sidebar menu which lets you type in a response to any review and submit it for the reviewer to see.
You can also set up email notifications within the platform to get information when someone leaves a review and respond to it. In the ‘subscriptions’ section of the menu, go to ‘emails for owners’ and select to receive these when a new review is published.
A great free marketing tool
While there is always the risk of a negative review, even that can be turned into a positive if you handle it the right way. And TripAdvisor is a great free marketing tool for hospitality businesses to use – and because so many companies are on there, you are missing out if you don’t use it.
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