Exclusive Interview: TripAdvisor Explains Guidelines for Marketers
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There is a lot of speculation going around the hotel industry on how they should interact with TripAdvisor. Since this site is so important for hospitality & travel marketing, I went right to the source to clarify a few things. Here is my conversation with TripAdvisor Vice President Michele Perry.
Josiah: If a hotel has a poor reputation on TripAdvisor, what steps should they take to improve it?
Michele: When a hotel has a poor ranking on TripAdvisor, it usually reflects problems with the property — grounds, staffing, cleanliness, service, or something else. The most important step hoteliers can take is to read the feedback they’ve received on TripAdvisor, and take the necessary steps to improve problem areas.
If a new owner has just taken over a property with a poor reputation, they can go to their owners’ page and fill out the change of ownership form with details of the nature of the ownership change, along with documentation that the change occurred, and we can remove reviews from the prior owner’s tenure.
Let’s be honest: as hotel marketing professionals it’s often our job to increase ranking on your site. What are some ethical ways we can do this – that you approve of?
TripAdvisor popularity index rankings are significantly impacted by the quantity of reviews, quality of reviews, and how recent those reviews are. You can’t approach improving TripAdvisor ranking as you might search engine optimization, where you can purchase keywords and impact your listings. The most important thing a hotelier can do is provide a good experience for their guests.
From a marketing professional’s perspective, you can educate guests about TripAdvisor and encourage them to write reviews of their stay. The more recent reviews you can help generate for your client, the better their ranking will be (assuming they are running a solid business).
On every hotel’s owners’ page we provide links that can be added to post-stay guest emails so that hoteliers can ask their recent guests to submit a review – the link makes it easy for the guest to get started. Also on the owners’ pages are new “write-a-review widgets” that can be added to a hotel’s website in minutes, so that visitors can write a review without searching TripAdvisor for the right page.
Are there any specifics you want us to avoid?
While we encourage you to encourage guests to write reviews, any sort of incentive – a free night, a coupon off the next stay, a discounted meal, etc. – is strictly against our rules.
And, of course, reviews need to be the honest, unbiased opinions of real travelers who have had an experience with your property.
Do you have any recommendations for integrating TripAdvisor into our website and marketing materials?
We strongly encourage property owners to register at www.tripadvisor.com/owners, and to learn about all available monitoring, management and marketing tools. We have a variety of customizable widgets that allow properties to display current review data on their websites, and we also offer “recommended on TripAdvisor” badges for your site. Research consistently shows that consumers trust other consumers, so adding TripAdvisor content to your property’s web site through our products gives your customers the review information they want. More than 5,000 hotels worldwide have done this and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.
Registering as an owner also puts properties on our newsletter list, which means they’ll receive first notification of new metrics and tools.
What day-to-day actions should hotel management take to ensure their hotel has a great presence on your site?
First and foremost, take good care of your property and guests. Check TripAdvisor everyday for new reviews and use the feedback to make appropriate adjustments. Owners can sign up for daily emails of new reviews so that they can stay current easily, and respond to reviews quickly.
Properties have the option to upload a photo, and as many videos as they like. We encourage owners to take advantage of this, and to keep their listing up-to-date.
How should management respond to reviews? Select ones: negative or positive feedback? Ignore them all?
We encourage hoteliers to address negative reviews with a management response on our site; we often hear that how a property reacts to the criticism is more important to prospective guests than the negative comments themselves. Some hoteliers choose to respond to positive reviews, also. We consider this less essential, but it certainly gives travelers an even better sense of who you as a hotelier and your property are.
Many thanks to Michele Perry and April Robb for making this possible.
Copyright notice: Please do not reprint this article without permission from Josiah Mackenzie (thanks!)
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Okay Well done, but a lot to be said about these answers….too much for a comment.
I was brooding on a new post already
Most important question you didn’t ask or was chosen not to be answered is my view – btw shared by Hospitality E Business – that Tripadvisor is just another (combination of) OTA(s) possibly luring your guests away….
Interesting feedbacks from TripAdvisor.
But people need to read others points of views in others blogs (lot of post about it) to make their own personal views on TripAdvisor and other hotel reviews system.
@Guido – I’ll be interested to read your post =) You have a point, but I think it’s important to know how to interact with TripAdvisor – since that may be the first point of contact for your hotel. Personally, I find hotels on TripAdvisor, then typically book directly on the hotel website. In my experience, many other travelers do the same.
@Claude – Do you have any specific articles you recommend?
Hi Josiah,
Always good to know which are the best practices in their point of view.
But I agree, in part, with HappyHotelier. It will always be a “masked” OTA.
Cheers
I respect how labour intensive dealing with hotels is, beyond just reviewers….. but their inconsistency with what is posted is tiring. Sometimes I can post an email, other times I can’t. Sometimes it seems they read it, other times they seem to randomly reject it… it is muddled. Albeit doing their best job, customer loyalty and satisfaction in our industry is so deeply rooted in consistency and meeting expectation. Without that TA marginalizes itself, and can jeapordize the trust the public has in the reviews, as well as the dedication content generators have in adding to the site, if they fear their meaningful content gets buried under shill reviews or the previously mentioned masked OTA’s. In the long run, it could be that small hip sellers like Tablet Hotels, or professional review services like Oyster.com can enter this market and take advantage of it. If a distributor allowed it’s loyal customers to start reviewing from within their network under the premise of customer service and watchdogging their member’s negative trends, it might actually start digging into TA. Frankly…. their rep is damaged, and unless they make a HUGE marketed push across the board to prove that these inconsistencies and ethical potholes are being resolved… they risk becoming irrelevant.
http://www.twitter.com/hhotelconsult
Well we thing Tripadvisor has a fair system. It gives us – as the hoteliers – the possibility to answer the reviews. This is something important. We all know that just a few guests take the time to write a review. Some of them are very happy and some of them are very angry. A guest with a “normal” experience in the hotel, normally doesn’t write a review.
With the possibility to answer on a review, we have the possibility to bring both – the very happy reviews and the very angry reviews- back to a baseline. Which makes it easier for our guests, because now they can focus on the facts – not on something emotional.
This possibility is not normal. For us in Germany we have some german competitors of TripAdvisor and additional some booking systems. All have a review system, but we can not answer them.
So a good and fair system for hotels and especially for our guests
Regards from Nuremberg
Hi Josiah –
Great post and very informative. I would like to follow up on Michele’scomment”If a new owner has just taken over a property with a poor reputation, they can go to their owners’ page and fill out the change of ownership form with details of the nature of the ownership change, along with documentation that the change occurred, and we can remove reviews from the prior owner’s tenure”.
Please see feedback recently that I received from a hotelier.
“Yes I have registered on the owners page . My experience is that if you contact the Trip Advisor back office (which is an art form in itself) you get a very quick reply if you are contacting them about something they are looking to promote and a very slow reply if you have a problem. I completed all their documentation for the change of ownership clean slate and after several weeks they came back to me to reject my application on the bizzare grounds that they don’t regard an official document confirming the sale and purchase of a lease as sufficient proof of change of ownership. I know for a fact that at least one of the reviews that were posted before the change of ownership was deliberately malicious to the previous owner because the person who posted it told me that was the case. Although in theory I would welcome having a link containing impartial reviews on my wesbite my experience does not lead me to believe that Trip Advisor is capable of providing this in a competent way – I also dislike the fact that they allow third parties that I don’t wish to deal with to pretend that they are in a position to offer availability at my hotel – thereby giving the misleading impression that we are fully booked when someone attempts to make a booking. I regard this as an unacceptable form of passing off and if I could muster the resources I would seriously contemplate taking legal action against the party in question.
The question is “Can Michele be of help to this gentleman? I would like to offer him further advice on how to solve his problem. Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Tom
Very interesting interview…but I miss the most important question: Why in TA is not required the reservation code in order to confirm real customers, and avoid false reviews?
Interesting idea about the reservation code. Do you know any other sites that used that successfully?
I have done some investigation here about Tripadvisor. I have worked with hotels for many years and this is what I can say for sure.
Hotel owners, mostly independent hotels, have lost control of their industry. Third parties have taken over while having little or no investment. These third parties, i.e. Tripadvisor, Hotels.com, Expedia and Hotwire, all of which are owned by Barry Diller have turned the independent owner into a pawn by having the ability to manipulate the reviews in such a way that they can actually redirect customers without them even knowing it.
How so? O.K. Go to Tripadvisor pick a city and see what you find. A list of hotels in a rating system from one to whatever number. If we believe the reviews some might have 15 reviews and are rated # 1, 2 or 3 (often these hotels have only recently signed up with these third parties). Then one will have 100 reviews and be rated somewhere in the so so area. Yet the 100 reviews have 75 very good ratings. The highest rated one could very well be an old hotel under new management and it might have been a dump in its previous listing life. The new hotel owner swiftly loads his fake reviews by having his family and associates post fake 5 star reviews. Tripadvisor can not stop these fakes if they are loaded in by different computers with different IP addresses. Think Kinko’s, UPS stores, etc. or even office depot while appearing to be looking to purchasing a new laptop.
This also applies to the other side of the picture. Someone loads bad reviews of their competitor. Or a crazy customer that did not get a discount and just creates new email accounts and looks like 30 different people. This all happens on tripadvisor every day. Because they do not require proof of you even having stayed at the hotel.
Now lets look at how Tripadvisor makes money. They make a % of every unit booked on Hotels.com, Expedia, Hotwire or an affiliate. No you say tripadvisor does not get a commission. Well kind of? They get a pay per click fee from most of their links. So the more they keep you going in circles the better. More clicks.
However Expedia, Hotwire and Hotels.com are owned by the same person that owns Tripadvisor. 25-35% of the hotel rate is what they get. Some hotels have contracts that are better for Expedia, etc. so you are now very cleverly directed to these hotels. How? By manipulating the reviews that is how. They remove negative reviews or hold back positive ones. Do they write them? No they just maneuver them. Which is the same thing in my book.
Also most of the time there is no discount at all. You just think you got one. Just check the room rate or call the hotel before booking and you will see that.
Now in the beginning these third parties were great for independent hotels because it got them in with the big boys on the web. Where can a small independent advertize. They could not take ads in every city in the world. So that was good in the start. However when Barry Diller saw the manipulation that was possible he began to purchase these companies and here we sit today all arguing with one another while he rakes in the cash.
The last thing that no one gets is this. Third parties have raised the price of rooms over the years. Hoteliers have adjusted prices to include their third parties commissions. Just a fact of doing business. As usual the angels become the devil and that what third party bookers have become.
Always call the hotel before booking. Because third party bookings get the worst rooms in a hotel because your booking is classified as a bargain hunter. If you book direct you get treated better and you have a direct relationship with the hotel not some third party that holds the hotel, less commission, funds for up to 30 days or more. Many times if there is a problem the hotel will tell Expedia to refund a guest payment. In that event what sometimes happens is the guest is told that the hotel would not refund the money. Then the hotel does not get the funds and Expedia keeps it all. No you say! They would not do that! Well let me show you how far they will go. Lets say you book a $100.00 + tax and the Hotel is paid $70.00 + tax. Where do you think the tax on $30.00 goes. Nowhere Expedia keeps it. Now if a company will cheat every city in the world out of sales taxes what do you think they will do to you. “BARRY DILLER” you are a piece of work!