Tnooz reader Michael Hraba, of Hraba Consulting, recently posted an open letter to TripAdvisor regarding its link-up with Market Metrix's review capture product Review Direct.
ReviewDirect places a live review form directly into the guest feedback survey, allowing properties to receive both a private guest survey and a publicly-facing review.
The integration looks like this:
The beef is that the playing field is supposedly uneven when a paid product makes it easier to rank more highly in the user-facing results on TripAdvisor.
Hraba says:
Review Direct is basically Tripadvisor sanctioning 'paying for more reviews'. There’s *SO* many questions here: about marginalizing the equity of Market Metrix’s internal reviews, about unfair advantages within competitive markets that basically lead to gaming the popularity index, etc.
I know Tripadvisor needs to legitimize reviews, but this is the wrong way to go about it... it seems an unfair advantage for hotels with marketing dollars vs the mom and pop that doesn’t have the money to pay for it.
Hraba goes on to point out potential legal liabilities should there be a correlation between revenues booked and popularity ranking, which he alleges can be manipulated with paid products:
It’s been well documented that higher Tripadvisor popularity rating equates to higher revenue, so couldn’t someone sue, saying that it is an uneven playing field, anti-competitive, etc? There could be monetary damages.
It feels like a legal liability to a number of the parties involved... this should be rolled out to everyone, equally, immediately, at no price. All hotel owners should be able to post verified comments and reviews… not just a few at a price.
But if Tripadvisor’s popularity index can be equated to revenue, then paying to increase your popularity seems very, *VERY* much a grey area.
The pay-to-play aspect of marketing services and enterprise-level software is always going to be a sore spot for small businesses (aka independent hoteliers) that are constricted by limited budgets. Larger properties are understandably more likely (although not always) able to pay for more robust software solutions.
Nonetheless, the product does not necessarily preclude smaller properties - it basically facilitates garnering more reviews.
As far as benefits of the service, here's what Market Metrix promises:
1. Scores – Survey takers tend to be more positive than review writers. A Market Metrix comparison of survey scores with online review scores discovered 74% fewer ratings of ‘1’ and 35% more ratings of ‘5’.
2. Review Volume – Our clients typically receive anywhere from 10-25x more surveys than TripAdvisor reviews. Tapping into guests already completing surveys can dramatically increase the number of TripAdvisor reviews.
3. Freshness – Because survey volume goes up, and because survey invitations are typically sent immediately after check-out, the number of recent reviews increases.
For its part, TripAdvisor has a series of tools that it makes available to hotels and other businesses to make it easier to get more reviews from past customers.
There are the in-person Master Classes and webinars, which then segue into a product announced last month called Review Express.
Trip Advisor's head of partnerships for hotels, Maud Larpent, spoke with Tnooz about how the company is trying to make the playing field as even as possible, both through education and a robust suite of tools.
Our aim at TripAdvisor is to make it as easy as possible for hospitality businesses of any size to collect reviews from their clients.
Market Metrix’s Review Direct (which can be free) is one of many options offered to business owners to collect reviews from their guests. We also know that not everyone works with Market Metrix, and have partnerships with different local market, domestic players.
With the independent hotelier in mind we launched Review Express last month. The new free service makes encouraging fresh reviews easier than ever by giving registered businesses the option to send customizable, bulk emails to their guests asking them to write a review about their customer experience.
We take care of the emailing, but the hotel can do the emailing themselves and include the review widget in the email. This allows them to integrate the review widget directly for users to engage with on their branded website.
It enables owners to send free messages to past guests and customers on behalf of their property, which automatically include a link to the property's "Write a Review" page on TripAdvisor.
Prior to this, in August last year, we launched the Full Review Form widget, a free online tool that empowers hotel, restaurant and attraction owners to collect candid reviews and opinions through their own websites to be published on TripAdvisor.
Business owners and marketers may download the Full Review Form tool immediately via the TripAdvisor Widget Center. This tool gives travelers the ability to complete the entire review process just as they would on TripAdvisor, but without leaving the business's website.
And yes, the TripAdvisor Popularity Index does take quantity, quality and freshness into account when making the rankings. So for those businesses eager to rank more highly, it does pay to play the game. And smaller properties with fewer guests will obviously have fewer opportunities to gather reviews.
Michelle Wohl, VP of marketing for Revinate, highlights the fact that garnering great reviews is still essential to success - regardless of what tools are used.
The bottom line is that reputation is a real driver in consumer booking decisions and hotels need to focus their attention on it and do everything in their power to be well positioned online.
TripAdvisor is very clear that its algorithm for their Popularity Index takes into account frequency of reviews, freshness of content and quality of reviews.
This algorithm has been constant for quite some time and we train our clients to focus on these drivers to ensure the best results on the site. Hotels that focus on service and drive reviews do outperform hotels in their market that don't proactively manage their reviews.
Of course, like all marketing and business in the changed business environment, there are multiple balls in play across different games.
Smart hoteliers have to simply buckle down and do what they can with the available resources - and realize that not all enterprise-level software will be useful or affordable to a business their size.
Wohl says:
Any hotel - branded or independent - has the power to be highly ranked if you have a great, high quality product that people want to review. So, while pushing reviews to TripAdvisor will drive up the number of reviews on the site, a hotel still needs to focus on quality for it to pay off.
Today, reviews play a powerful role in improving the operations of a hotel. Our clients don't just read and respond to reviews. They use the feedback to make operational improvements, base capital improvement decisions upon it and see it as a way to get closer to their guests.
You don't need a paid product to drive more public reviews. In your post stay emails you can easily encourage public reviews with a link to TripAdvisor (or Yelp, or any review site or OTA). However, if you want to analyze your feedback and understand where you are doing well against your comp set, an automated solution, like Revinate, will help you operationalize feedback and show you what your guests love about your property and where you need to focus resources.
The creative industry adage, "you can have something cheap and slow, or expensive and quick," applies here, meaning that solutions that provide rapid results, eliminate a time suck or greatly improve service standards are generally going to cost more money then DIY.
Regardless of purchasing power, creativity, focus and cleverness are three ways for scrappy hoteliers to ensure the greatest impact of the review marketing dollar.