Great innovations in travel: Traveler Reviews

Some innovations might leave us with mixed feelings. But whether we like them or not, they transform the landscape forever. Traveler reviews are an example in point. They are now the Supreme Court Justices of travel, whether for hotels, restaurants, attractions, etc. Guest reviews have turned the customer into a king – truly.

Businesses thrive because of their guest reviews – or they sometimes die of it.
TripAdvisor first launched as an aggregator of guidebooks back around 2000. You were to use the site to assemble information from various expert guides in order to build your trip. Somewhere on the page, however, as an experiment, the site also started to feature a footnote button inviting users to post their own reviews. What should the site be, a guidebook by travel experts or a guestbook by ordinary users?

That user review feature is what took off and turned TripAdvisor into a powerhouse of travel. Travelers started posting their own opinions – applauding the places they had enjoyed or getting even with the venues that treated them poorly. Not only did other users enjoy reading these reviews, but these reviews also generated more and more content for TripAdvisor, giving the site ever-growing visibility. Hotels and tourist attractions posted their TripAdvisor certificates on their doors. They chased down guest reviews – all resulting in more and more content and more free publicity for TripAdvisor.

Some 3-4 years later, Yelp launched a similar user-review service. And Google (in case you are wondering) first displayed their own user reviews in 2007.
How big of an impact have guest reviews had on travel? I would argue that they make or break a business, particularly in the travel where clients do not have local knowledge and thus they rely on reviews. Pick any restaurant that you don’t already know, will you book it if it has negative reviews? Will you even see it if it has no reviews and no visibility online?

I also see hotels obsess over their TripAdvisor rankings – often to the detriment of their business. A bad review can reshuffle your priorities and make you lose sight of the services that are key to your client. A scanting review of your restaurant might shift your focus to that part of your hotel business, losing sight of the fact that one client in 100 actually goes to the restaurant, and you ought to pay attention to Reception instead.

As travel operators, often the joke is on us all. Anybody can review your business, even if they never attended. “Agencies” (read “review farms”) might offer to write reviews for you – for a fee of course. As far as I know, Tripadvisor is still unable to review that all reviews are first-hand.

But still, guest reviews have turned things on their heads. Customers are now kings. And you cannot thrive without a decent rating.

Every business needs to get organized. To monitor the reviews that flourish on websites that matter. To respond to negative reviews. To try and get suspicious reviews removed. And, in the end, to obtain a good overall rating through hard work and proper attention to guests.

Users don’t always read, that much is true. But they do follow those 5 yellow stars.  If the internet is important to your travel business, then you need your 5 stars.