How to increase direct bookings with targeted review content
OTA’s significantly changed the travel industry with pricing transparency and a large selection of accommodations. Yet they pose a huge challenge to individual hotels offering online bookings due to price comparisons and competition. There is almost no getting around online travel agencies: hotels benefit from large-scale marketing strategies, a broad customer base, and last minute sales. The disadvantage comes with the high commissions, which reinforces the desire for more direct bookings. Aside from the price-benefit-ratio, reviews play an important role when making a booking decision. TrustYou is the world’s largest feedback platform and supports hoteliers to make their best use of reviews to increase direct bookings and to collect and analyze a higher number of reviews. Through our partnership with Google, TrustYou Stars enables hoteliers to push survey guest feedback directly into Google to receive better visibility and a better ranking on Google.
The more reviews that exist about a hotel make it more visible and increase it’s chance to be found. Reviews are also necessary to build trust among travelers to result in more direct bookings.
When searching for an accommodation, travelers reach a hotel website in two ways: via an OTA, which features the hotel in its offers, or directly via a Google search. As soon as the traveler visits the hotel website, he or she needs to be able to find all relevant information about the hotel in an appealing, detailled, and trustworthy way to be confident in making the decision to book direct. It is a major plus to have an integrated Meta-Review – summary of all verified reviews – in the website to show unbiased information. The Meta-Review displays all relevant review information summarized and travelers have the same booking experience that is offered by OTAs and are encouraged to book directly. Furthermore, Google utilizes the TrustScore and integrates it into the organic search result.
The TrustScore is the industry standard review score even being used within Google Search and Google Maps. The higher the TrustScore is, the higher is the probability of a booking. TrustYou Analytics provides the hotel with a full overview of all reviews – from deliberate collected guest feedback to online platforms and social media channels. Once guest feedback is analyzed, the tool shows the hotelier where he should reply, how the competitive environment is seen, and where investments are necessary to improve the offer and operations.
Therefore, with TrustYou hoteliers can collect their own reviews, analyze all the reviews about their hotel worldwide, and impact millions of travelers and potential guests to find and book the hotel directly.
