TripAdvisor attracts over 390 million users every single month and has become the go-to search engine for planning days out with family and friends.In a world where recommendations from our peers are now the most influential advertisement for any given attraction, the importance of TripAdvisor has reached an all-time high, and effective tactics to improve ratings are important. So, how can a mobile app help?
If you want to maximise how effective your mobile app is at collecting TripAdvisor reviews, you must first understand your customer journey from the point of view of an app user.
At a very high level, it looks something like this:
User action: Download the app from the App Store
Stage: Pre-visit, pre-purchase
User thoughts: Considering whether to visit
User action: Purchase tickets and plan a date to visit
Stage: Pre-visit, post-purchase
User thoughts: Planning for their visit and building anticipation
User action: Spend time at the attraction
Stage: During visit
User thoughts: Maximising their enjoyment
User action: Go home at the end of the day
Stage: Post-visit
User thoughts: Sharing their day (good or bad) and considering the next visit
It’s important to consider because it's only valuable to encourage users to leave a review during the post-visit stage. If the user is prompted to leave a review a couple of hours into their day, or worse, before they've even decided to visit, it's a jarring experience.
Understanding that you must target users who have just finished their visit is one thing, but how do you go about actually asking for reviews?
The trick to boosting ratings through your mobile app is to ask the right visitors to leave a review. You want to proactively encourage those who've enjoyed their visit to share their experience on TripAdvisor, which is why, instead of asking for a review straight away, you first need to ask for feedback.
By asking for feedback first, you get to check whether the visitor actually had a good experience before encouraging them to leave a TripAdvisor review. It can be as simple as asking, "Did you have a good day today?" with the option to respond yes or no.
Once this system is in place, you'll have a constant stream of happy guests who are automatically asked to leave a review. This is important because it also helps to counteract negativity bias, which makes us more attentive to negative situations than positive ones. A positive experience is less memorable than a negative one, and so a guest is more likely to leave a review about a negative experience.
In the Attractions.io platform we have a contextual home screen. This is a screen that adapts to the current time, location and demographics of each individual user, surfacing the most useful content for each stage in their journey.In this case, once the day is over, you can automatically thank the user in-app for their visit, and encourage them to provide feedback on their day. Remember, the important thing is to be asking the right users, at the right time.
Another, more proactive way to ask for feedback is to send a notification to the user, perhaps at a certain a time on the evening of their visit (e.g. 7 pm). An example message could read:
Thanks for visiting today — we hope you had a fantastic time! Please provide us with some quick feedback on your experience today.
That's the good stuff covered, but what about those guests who haven't had a great time? Should we just ignore them and hope that contextual targeting will overpower their voices? Definitely not!
If you learn that a visitor has had a negative experience, you want to understand why so that you can take action to prevent similar occurrences in the future.
There are numerous options for capturing negative feedback, from having a fully-fledged in-app survey to providing users with the email address for guest services. The important thing is that you learn and take action.
The great thing about using a mobile app to boost TripAdvisor reviews is that it offers the perfect contextual medium. You can target certain users, at a certain time, in order to collect reviews that are more likely to be favourable.
However, this should never be at the expense of rectifying negative opinions. In fact, a mobile app should be embraced as the perfect feedback collection tool, too!
If you’re interested in using a mobile app to boost your TripAdvisor ratings or collect feedback from guests, get in touch.
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