Tripadvisor has been part of planning travel and leisure for 16 years

Consumers are fascinated with Tripadvisor, for most travellers consulting the site is essential; part of the process of planning and booking.

Businesses use TripAdvisor as they see fit, some run from the website and refuse to engage with it, some companies embrace it and use it to reach out to new customers. 

We’re going to share some of what we’ve learnt about the site as a tool to help grow our business over the last 7 years.

Land & Wave is an outdoor, adventure company based in Swanage, Dorset. People pay us to provide epic experiences in, on and near the sea.

TripAdvisor is credible   

Soon after starting our company we asked friends and family to leave us reviews, some of them hadn’t even experienced our activities, within a week or two mods had removed all of the ‘fake’ reviews and sent us a very clear email warning us that should any more spurious reviews ever be created our listing would be removed.

We have, occasionally, received reviews that were clearly about the wrong company or malicious or written by our competitors. Every single inaccurate review that we have identified to the site has been reviewed and removed in less than 24 hours.

We have the ability to respond to our customers once they have reviewed our services, we can thank them or ask for ways we can improve what we do in the future.

TripAdvisor is a huge boost to marketing 

Tripadvisor helps companies stand out from the crowd, small organisations can compete with large companies with big marketing budgets.

Consumers can find you without direct searches, a group looking for ‘something amazing to do in Dorset’ can find out what we do and be directed to our website without having to Google our specific activities.

TripAdvisor gives consumers the power to choose based on quality of service; real insight into what they get for their hard earned cash. Land & Wave is the best value coasteering in Dorset, we do not offer the cheapest prices but we can show that our customers get the best quality experience possible.

Marketing tools provided by the site are easy to access and simple to use; consumers can identify TA badges and awards instantly, they know what those awards mean

Land & Wave is 7 years old, we’ve grown really, really fast. Half day adventure experiences are an important part of our business, Tripadvisor has been the single most important marketing tool for this part of our business.

We learnt to shout about Tripadvisor when the company was still young; we did the best job we could then asked our clients to help us by writing us a review.

We direct people to our TA page from social media, we make sure that every ‘product page’ of our website has clear links to it , we reward staff that get mentioned, we train our staff team to talk about leaving us a review when they say goodbye to our clients.

Problems we’ve had with Tripadvisor 

Less than 0.1% of our clients leave us reviews, we’ve tried really hard to encourage more than this but not much has worked so far.

There’s no easy API at the moment, integration of the site into our online content has been a challenge.

TripAdvisor the Facts

320 million reviews and opinions from travellers around the world.

More than 6.2 million businesses and properties in 128,000+ destinations, including.

More than 53 million traveller photos. 200 new contributions every minute. 96 million members worldwide.

TripAdvisor can, and should, be an important tool for marketing your business. Like it or not consumers ARE looking at the reviews about your business. Take control, ensure your staff are well trained and your products are high quality and the right price.

Tripadvisor is credible, visible and it’s reviews are powerful.

There’s been some media reports about businesses angry with Tripadvisor for consistent negative reviews. As with all things; you reap what you sow; Tripadvisor can only work for companies that provide a high level of service, who listen to their customers and are prepared to innovate and improve all of the time.

21 July 2016 by Owen Senior