TripAdvisor, the self-proclaimed largest travel community in the world, brings in 455 million unique visitors every month and has over 96 million registered users. In reality, TripAdvisor isn’t just one website — it’s actually a collection of 48 sites offered in 29 different languages. And with such extensive global reach, it represents an incredible marketing opportunity for tour and activity operators worldwide. But to take full advantage of this amazing platform, you first have to improve your TripAdvisor Ranking.
Improving your ranking on TripAdvisor pushes your offer higher on their suggestion list, which directly affects how many users see your listings and book your services. To help you get the highest ranking possible in the shortest amount of time, we’ve put together a brief list of things you can do right now to start positioning yourself on TripAdvisor.

TripAdvisor & bookingkit

If you have a Viator account, you can add a “Book Now” button to your tour and activity listings on TripAdvisor. All orders placed through Viator and TripAdvisor are automatically registered in your bookingkit account. To link Viator and TripAdvisor to your bookingkit, simply go to the marketing tab and activate the connection. For full details, have a look at our help article on this topic.

How ratings affect your TripAdvisor Ranking

Unlike Google or Amazon, TripAdvisor’s activity recommendations are based primarily on ratings. Ratings therefore become the deciding factor for potential bookers when choosing between your activity and those of your competitors. According to TripAdvisor itself, the platform has collected a total of more than 630 million ratings and reviews. It’s no surprise that ratings — not price — have become the central mechanism behind how TripAdvisor ranks businesses and activities.

Four key factors for improving your TripAdvisor Ranking through Ratings

TripAdvisor actually takes into account 4 review-related factors when deciding how to rank your services: quality, recency, quantity and frequency of your reviews.
The goal then is to achieve a steady stream of positive reviews at a high enough rate for the ratings to boost your ranking.
Two ways for your business to achieve this are the following:

1. Make sure you pro-actively ask for reviews from your attendees and work this request seamlessly into your process (one example of this could be at the end of your experience when you send them a photo)
2. Deal with negative feedback quickly, correctly, and try to improve your experience based on it.

How to generate more reviews for your TripAdvisor Ranking

Before we get into the tools available for improving your TripAdvisor Ranking, it’s worth taking a second to emphasize just how important it is to streamline the review process for customers, and the positive impact this will have on your review response rate. Here are three things to note:

1. Customers should be able to leave reviews in lots of different ways and through multiple relevant channels;
2. Leaving reviews should be easy, seamless, and presented to them with no additional effort;
3. Customers should be able to refer to templates or clear prompts to know how best to structure their feedback, so as to bring you the most value. The less work people have to do, the better. And there’s really no sense in missing out on positive reviews just because it’s too complicated for customers to leave them.

Using what you’ve got: Your website, your employees and your customer communication are a great starting point for pro-actively requesting feedback and letting folks know that reviews go a long way toward helping you improve your tours, activities and services.
bookingkit: bookingkit users get access to a powerful, fully-automated reviews and ratings collection process. If you’re already using bookingkit, simply activate and configure the automated After Sales Email feature and be sure to include information about how to submit reviews in each and every email.

TripAdvisor tools: TripAdvisor wants users to leave lots of reviews and ratings and has provided a series of useful tools to help service providers collect feedback from customers. An overview of TripAdvisor’s promotional materials is available here. TripAdvisor focuses heavily on printed materials such as business cards, flyers and stickers, but there are also plenty of digital media to choose from, including logos, banners and widgets. It’s also worth mentioning TripAdvisor’s Review Express, which you might consider using in conjunction with bookingkit’s automated after sales emails. Check it out!

How responding to reviews can improve your TripAdvisor Ranking

Showing current and potential customers that you value their feedback is a great way to incentivize reviews and show that you prioritize customer satisfaction.
We recommend responding to every single review — the good and the bad. And be sure to follow TripAdvisor’s Response Guidelines to avoid having your account blocked for policy violations.

How to respond to positive reviews

Responding to positive reviews is the easy part. Here you want to make sure you thank the reviewer for their feedback and show that you’re just as excited about having them as a customer as they are about your services. And be sure to mention that you look forward to seeing them again soon at one of your activities.

Dealing with negative feedback

Ideally, you want to get on top of negative feedback before it gets to TripAdvisor so that you can prevent it from turning into bad reviews. There are several ways to go about this, from personally showing up at your events, checking in with your customers and making sure they are enjoying themselves, to providing them with contact information on your website and at your locations to make sure they can provide you with feedback directly. Responding to complaints quickly and offering refunds, discounts and other forms of compensation are other effective ways to rectify the situation and avoid the need to go public with their negative feedback.
However, don’t be surprised if you still get some bad reviews every now and again: it’s bound to happen. Respond to them publicly, graciously and in a timely manner to show them and other potential buyers that you truly care.

How improving your TripAdvisor ratings impacts other sales channels

bookingkit makes it possible to use your customer ratings and reviews from Tripadvisor, Google and Facebook as social proof on your website and booking page, in order to provide potential bookers with the further information they need to make their decision. This means that potential customers can see directly in the embedded bookingkit window how satisfied other bookers are with your services. And if they want to know more about a particular review, all they have to do is open the detail view for the tour or activity in question. The benefits are three-fold:

1. Build greater trust in your services which results in more bookings
2. Improve customer relations and encourage more repeat business
3. Improve your search engine rankings thanks to user-generated content!

For more information on this topic, we recommend you read How to Turn Customer Ratings into More Sales.