First, let me put the facts in front of you:
-In the US around 79% of travelers say that reviews play an important role while making a decision for online hotel booking.(Source – Phocuswright 2012)
-In the past 1 year, 50% of travelers have written an online review.(Source – Phocuswright 2016)
-41% of the US travelers prefer not to book hotels that do not have reviews.(Phocuswright Leisure Travel Study, Oct 2015)
It is clear from the facts that the more reviews you show the more it will help you in influencing guests to book at your property.
Let’s see how Google reviews and TripAdvisor can aid you in pumping online presence of hotel:
Everybody Googles around when they want to research before traveling. As per the study made by Google(Google/Ipsos Media CT, 2015 Traveler’s Road to Decision), 65% of leisure travelers and 69% of business travelers generally research online before deciding where they would like to travel, shop or stay.
Did you know that a Google research states that booking path of travelers is not linear? That means when a traveler is booking the current trip he may be thinking about his next trip as well.
One more article by Google “How Micro-Moments are Reshaping the Travel Customer Journey” suggests that as a hotel marketer it’s up to you to present the relevant information to the travelers. Even the hoteliers need to look out for ways how they can help in solving the needs of travelers and how the brand can assist in catering those needs.
The Google reviews play a significant role influencing the booking decisions of travelers. Google displays the organic results to travelers whenever they search for hotels in a destination.
There are three major factors that bring up relevant search results. These factors are relevance, distance and prominence. Therefore, more reviews and higher review scores boost hotel’s local ranking and increase chances of coming up as the better choice among other hotels.
TripAdvisor is one of the most influential travel websites in the world. The study by Phocuswright in 2014 about TripAdvisor reveals that about 77% of guests refer to reviews on TripAdvisor and 80% read at least 6 to 12 reviews before making a reservation.
There are three main principles that affect the rankings in TripAdvisor, which are:-
Quality – Positive reviews increase the quality and negative reviews decrease it.
Quantity – Certainly number of reviews have more weight than less or no reviews.
Recency – The recent reviews are preferred over the older reviews.
Thus, TripAdvisor considers all of these factors to accurately rank hotels and represent them in front of the travelers.
Hotels don’t need to think twice and go for all the means to get reviews from the guests. More reviews lead to improvement in hotel visibility on these sites. Therefore, boosting online reviews in Google and TripAdvisor strongly impacts the booking decisions of travelers.
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