How to Increase Your Quantity of Reviews on TripAdvisor

This week, we will focus on ways for you to increase the quantity of reviews you get on TripAdvisor.

Click to read Part I or Part II.

TripAdvisor and others state that the best way to get more reviews is to ask for it. While this is true, there are problems that you have to overcome for it to be efficient and actually have an impact.

You have to re-engage your guests to get a review after they have left your location and are already on their next adventure. You have to reduce the barriers they have to providing a review, making it really easy. You also need to ensure that you and your staff are not wasting your limited time.

As a result, your goals should be to:

1. Re-engage your guests to relive the moment


2. Reduce the barriers to reviews


3. Automate the review process

If you are able to achieve this you will see a constant flow of new reviews and also an increase in your year-over-year reviews, making TripAdvisor’s algorithm happy and increasing your ranking.

How can we reach these goals? Well, it’s not rocket science, it’s simply combining basic psychology with the technology that is in your guests hands.

Re-engage Your Guests to Relive the Moment

Photos are important for re-engagement and reliving an experience. By delivering or selling photos to your guests, you are doing more than just receiving an auxiliary revenue stream or getting free social media marketing. Want a guest to remember their great experience? Use photos.

Photos trigger memories and have the highest rate of memory recall when compared to other mediums like words or drawings. According to studies published in Imagery, Memory and Cognition, photos have far better memory recall than words because human memory is extremely sensitive to symbolic representations of events.

In the published studies, memory recall decreased by about 80% if words were used to trigger the memory over a period of 0 to 72 hours. Memory recall barely decreased, at about 20%, over the same time period, when photos were used to trigger the memory. This is a staggering difference! Photos trigger memories, words do not.

Photos continue to have a bigger impact on your guest. Exciting photos lead to better memory recall both in the short term and in the long term**,** versus something that is not exciting to that person. This is according to a the study Remembering Pictures, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology Learning Memory and Cognition.

What this means is photos are the best tool you can use to get your guests to easily remember their tour and the emotions they felt while doing it. Why is this important?

**Re-engagement. **Through photos, your guests will be able easily recall your business and the experience they had while on the tour. All the positive emotions will be rushing forward while they browse their photos. You now have them fully re-engaged, reliving their experience

Your window of engagement significantly expands by using photos. Via photos, memories remain vivid even 24-72 hours after a tour, unlike other mediums like text emails, where memory rapidly drops.

As a result, if you use photos, your guest will be perfectly primed and engaged to give you a rating. They will be reliving the experience and wanting to tell the world about their amazing experience.

Reduce the Barriers to Reviews

The harder it is for someone to do something, the less likely they will do it. This is common knowledge. No one wants to work, especially while they are vacation. This makes it even harder to get people motivated to provide a review.

There are a ton of barriers that you have to overcome to get your guests reviewing. It can feel like trying to move mountains to overcome these roadblocks. Your guests have to remember to rate you, they have to type and recall their password, follow up emails can feel more like spam to them, emails get lost and a guest isn’t going to go looking for it, they have to sign into an account, and they can forget about how great the experience was because they are already on to the next adventure.

Even if you are able to re-engage your guests, if you cannot reduce these barriers to rating, you are going to have a hard time getting more reviews.

Using PicThrive, with 1-click, your guests are able to easily provide a review on TripAdvisor. It’s that simple. They are already engaged and relieving their experience while looking at their photos. You are now able to make it super simple for them, removing the barriers to reviews. In doing so, you can expect your quantity of reviews to increase.

Automate the Review Process

How can you automate the task of asking for reviews?

Let’s first explore the manual way. Your staff ask your guests for a review or hand out physical cards. The cards have your TripAdvisor details and what company guests have to search printed on it. Your guests have to remember, find a web browser, type in the address, search, login and then provide a rating. Your staff also has to remember to hand out the cards and ask for a review in the limited time they have between tours. You have to hope that guests remember to review after they leave or you have to follow up with them manually.

To automate it you can send a text email, asking guests to review their tour. As we have seen, text and emails in general lead to lower engagement and lower memory recall. These emails are also limited to those whose information you have, which is probably just the booking group leader. The email to review process does work, but it is still heavily flawed.

You then have to hope that you are able to re-engage that person with an email that doesn’t get lost or look like spam. That email has to spark all the positive emotions they felt while on the tour. Provided that you have setup the link correctly, it can be clicked and the review can be made relatively easily. It may be automated, but it doesn’t have scope, nor does it engage your guests or remove the barriers to getting reviews.

With PicThrive, while your guests are viewing their photos and all the positive emotions and memories of the experience are rushing forward, you are able to automatically ask guests for a review via our customer engagement tools.

In as little as 2-clicks, you will be setup and automatically asking guests to provide you a review on TripAdvisor. It couldn’t be more simple for you or more engaging for your guests.

The number of guests you are able to reach also increases when using photos. With email, you are only able to connect with the group leader as that is the only email address you have. Photos on the other hand, expands your scope to everyone in the group. Your reach is significant, guests are engaged and all the hard work is automatically taken care of for you.

Increase TripAdvisor reviews with instant guest photo sharing

To increase the quantity of your reviews on TripAdvisor it is important to focus on three goals:

1. re-engage your guests to relive the moment


2. reduce the barriers to reviews


3. automate the review process

By using PicThrive you are able to excel at the three goals of re-engaging your guests, reducing the barriers to rating and automating the review process.