NB: This is an article by Ellis Connolly of TrustYou via Leonardo
I’d like to start out this blog post with a brief story about tomato soup…
While my wife was pregnant with my son, she had a late night craving for tomato soup. This happened to be an item that we never had in our pantry, nor had I ever seen her eat during our 10+ years together. So while I stood in the soup aisle at our local grocery store, I was overwhelmed by the amount of options I had in front of me. A million questions went through my head, such as “have I heard of this brand before?”, “which one is the best value?”, and “should I consider the nutritional value?”
After an in-depth analysis of all my options, I finally left the store with a winner. Now, two years later, our family has that tomato soup and grilled cheese every Thursday for dinner.
For today’s traveler, booking a hotel is a lot like buying tomato soup. They are practically overwhelmed with options when searching for a hotel on search engines, OTAs and travel sites, making it easy for the “right” hotel to go unnoticed. Nevertheless, hotels still have the ability to guide travelers booking decisions by leveraging guest reviews.
Aside from price and location, a hotel’s guest reviews and ratings are a major decision factor for travelers. As 95% of travelers check the hotel’s reviews before deciding to book, hundreds of thousands of hotels and travel intermediaries choose to incorporate review content onto their websites.
Choose your Review Content Wisely
However, not all review content should be treated equal. In order to understand traveler behavior even more, TrustYou conducted a study assessing and comparing full-text, aggregated visualization, or a combination of both. In the study, we found that travelers preferred summarized review content, specifically noting that it was time-efficient, user-friendly, mobile-friendly, and provided a better overview of the hotel.
Considering that guest feedback plays an important role in traveler booking decisions, and that summarized review content is more easily consumed, travel intermediaries have begun leveraging this specific type of review content on their websites. For example, TrustYou Meta-Review data is displayed on some of the world’s largest travel search sites such as Google, KAYAK, Hotels.com, FTI and many more, effectively influencing millions of travelers.
So now that you know summarized review content is effective, and OTAs are leveraging them today, what can your hotel do about it? The answer is easier than you might think.
TrustYou seeks to help hotels leverage summarized review content to increase bookings on their own hotel websites. Travelers who find your hotel’s website in their search will profit from the same level of detail as when they search on any of the major travel websites. This enables travelers to make a quick decision about booking with your hotel, and is a great starting point to repeat bookings in the future.
Who knows? Maybe you’ll even become their trusted [tomato soup] brand for life.
