A great study for travel businesses came out just last month.
The study, provided by Trip Advisor, did a survey of 100,000 travelers and travel business owners to gain insight into travel business reviews.
Let’s look at the findings and examine what they mean for you.
Travelers Like Helping Others
88% of travelers leave reviews because they like helping other travelers. Nearly the same number of people, 86%, writes reviews because they themselves find reviews helpful and want to give back.
When encouraging people to leave reviews for your travel business tap into this need to help others. It’s obvious that this is the main reason people leave reviews. Yes, they want to help you to provide better service, but that’s more of a byproduct.
When asking for reviews, slant your messaging in a way that encourages your visitors to help other travelers by leaving reviews of your service.
You’ll also learn from the reviews, but that’s not the main purpose. It’s not about you. It’s about your customers.
Travelers Write Reviews Shortly After Their Experience
67% of travelers write reviews within two days of their experience. 72% say it takes them 10 minutes or less to write the review.
Quickly ask for reviews from your visitors. Some will do it on their own and that’s good, but ask for reviews as people are leaving.
Don’t push to slant their view in anyway. Simply explain where they can leave reviews and let them provide their honest assessment.
People are likely to leave reviews very soon so don’t be afraid to send them emails even the next day after they leave. Most have smartphones now so sending an email reminder for a review is totally fine even if the person isn’t home and in front of their computer.
Travelers Want Balanced Reviews That Explain Why
79% of travelers want a balance review and 72% want the reviewer to explain why something was liked or disliked.
People can sense when a review is very biased one way or the other. These reviews are often overlooked or passed over. So don’t look too deeply into a review that just blasts your company. That will happen. You can’t please everybody especially when you’re a growing or large company.
But the same is true for over-the-top positive reviews. People like those, but they look for more detail and context when really trying to assess your travel business.
Going back to why people write reviews – helping others – encourage detailed reviews by telling people that a detailed review will be most helpful for others looking to make a decision.
Travelers Want Practical Tips
84% of travelers want practical tips that can improve their experience.
That number is for attractions, but it’s something that came up for other travel businesses including hotels and restaurants.
The first takeaway here is to again encourage your visitors to provide tips and secrets for how they made their experience with you special and enjoyable. Tell them that those types of tips are the most helpful to other travelers.
And you can also learn from this by providing your own practical tips on something like a blog on your website.
Not all visitors are going to leave reviews, but you can talk to your customers. Ask them why they enjoyed something or why they didn’t enjoy something. Ask what they did to make something enjoyable. Collect those helpful tips and insight and create a blog post or guide for your future guests.
Final Thought
Reviews are very important in the travel industry. They help travel businesses, but even more they are helpful for travelers. If you want to provide the best experience for travelers while growing your business use the tips above to get the most out of travel reviews.
