Tripadvisor Review – What Is Review Express?

Tripadvisor Review Express may change the way you deal with your business…

Early in May, Tripadvisor rolled out a free marketing tool called ‘Review Express’: you can now send bulk emails to all of your past guests to ask for a review and therefore leverage the power of one of the most important factors influencing decisions for over 90% percent of holiday makers.

The idea behind Tripadvisor review tool seems pretty interesting and luring, given the fact that we can personally confirm how lots of (positive), genuine and recent reviews get you more enquiries and help you out converting them into actual bookings, once you follow the exact steps we perform (and we teach online) to “wow” our prospective guests and clear any doubt!

Tripadvisor Review Express – How Does It Work?

[wpsharely id=”3399″]According to Tripadvisor Review Express, it only takes 5 easy steps to get multiple reviews! You can watch this 3 minute video below, then read on to review each step one by one.

Step 1: Access Tripadvisor Review Exprees at www.tripadvisor.com/ReviewExpress and enter your business email address which will display in the “from” section of guests’ inboxes. Any reply to the reminder emails will be sent to this address.

Step 2: Once inside Tripadvisor Review Express, enter past guests email addresses one by one, separated by a comma or upload a spreadsheet of up to 1000 email addresses.

Step 3: Choose an image or logo to appear next to your property name and address. You can either select those in your backend within Tripadvisor Review Express or upload a file from your computer.

Step 4: Create your message, select your language and default text will appear. Amend the text accordingly and remember that shorter emails work better (this is not just Tripadvisor Review Express tip, it’s solid best practice).

Step 5: Preview your message then send. You can select a checkbox to automatically send a reminder to guests who don’t respond and a copy of the email to yourself as well. Tripadvisor Review Express will take care of that on your behalf.

After you are done following Tripadvisor Review Express steps, this is how your message will look like:

Your guests will be presented with TripAdvisor Review Guidelines after completing their review, to make sure they comply with the rules set up by TripAdvisor to minimize chances of fake reviews.

Tripadvisor Review Express – Pros and Cons

As we are going to cover in detail at the next HomeAway Owners Direct Owner Summit in London on 28.09.2013, reviews play an ever growing, fundamental part in the success of your holiday home. Statistics show that travellers are more inclined to choose a property that has reviews over one that hasn’t and properties with lots of reviews win over those with just a few. Why?

The answer is pretty simple: how would YOU decide to trust a venue that is not necessarily a well established business, known for its reputation, reliability and quality service? You need some kind of evidence that your next buy is worth the money and time invested in finding the right place to stay on your next holiday. And what’s better than reading feedback from someone just like you, who’s been there before and tested the place firsthand?

The more reviews your property has the higher the reputation, credibility and reliability in the eyes of prospective guests. Nedless to say, reviews must be 5 stars or you may turn them against you. Tripadvisor Review Express has some unquestionable advantages, but there is one single killer disadvantage that we must all be aware of and surprisingly enough, both Tripadvisor and its most direct competitors do not seem to have taken that into account…

Pros

Tripadvisor Review Express first and most obvious advantage is the ability to collect tens if not even hundreds of reviews almost on autopilot. Secondly, Tripadvisor Review Express gives you the chance to customize a really pleasant message, adding the personal touch (your logo, a picture of your home) which makes for a strong branding and increases awareness, trust and credibility.

Lastly, Tripadvisor Review Express allows you to send an automatic reminder one week after you sent your initial request for feedback, and that increases chances to collect reviews while not being too intrusive. But…

The “Huge” Con

What if you get not just one, but several bad reviews as a result of using something like Tripadvisor Review Express? What if you gave an unhappy guest the silver bullet to kill your business? That’s should be one of your worst nightmares and something you should always stay away from.

Bad reviews can kill your business, no matter how hard you worked to build everything up! So you must develop a white hat strategy to protect you from being hurt and minimize chances you get a feedback you never wanted the world to know.

How do you make sure that won’t happen? The strategy we use is really simple and I bet some of you here will do that already! Shortly after the guest returns back home, we send them a very kind email, where we ask how their stay was. We aim to understanding whether their stay was good or bad. Thanks to the formula we use in our message, we collect lots of precious information, not only on their stay, but also on the entire experience, which then drives us in the right direction. If their ‘private’ feedback is positive, then we send them a second email where we give them the exact links to post their reviews online and we also add a further trick to make it dead easy for them to leave their feedback on more than one site! So we basically filter the feedback that will be publicly displayed before it gets to sites like Tripadvisor or HomeAway, we are able to keep control of what the world will know about our properties and we manage to get it on more than one site all in a single email. It’s that simple!

That said, we regret to say that as of now, we do not feel it is 100% safe to use Tripadvisor Review Express given its major weakness and we’d rather advice you to follow our simple tactic, which regardless of not allowing the shortcut offered by Tripadvisor Review Express, grants you on the other hand 100% positive results.[/wpsharely]

If you want to know what we ask our guests and how we master the art of collecting loads of 5 star, genuine raving reviews on multiple sites at once, either join us at the Onwer Summit in September, sign up for the video recording of our session, or simply take a shortcut and be the first to know when we’ll share our best practices and secrets again with the “Fully Booked Formula”.

About the Team:

We share some of our most valuable tips, tricks & ideas to help you make the most of your business strategies! Some tips will be mind blowing, some tricks may not apply to your specific case. We do our best to give you as many “A-Ha” moments as possible anyway and trust you’ll adapt them to your holiday home/vacation rental business. Connect with us by leaving your comments below, pose questions or suggest better ideas with just a click on the blue “feedback” tab on the right —————————————>>