Why Dialogue works - part 2: analysing reviewers' behaviour

A little research can often go a long way. We recently analysed the experience of one of our larger hotel clients on TripAdvisor, focusing on pre- and post-implementation of Dialogue. What did we find?

Firstly, that their TripAdvisor ranking began to improve. Well, that's not particularly newsworthy in itself, all our clients who operate Dialogue as per the manual have seen their rankings rise. But when we looked more closely we did find something interesting:

That their reviewers broke down into two distinct 'types', let's call them 'Type 1' and 'Type 2'...

'Type 1' - is the habitual TripAdvisor reviewer. They post reviews whenever and wherever they stay...

'Type 2'- rarely, if ever, post reviews unless they are dissatisfied

Let's look at the raw data:

We looked at reviewers scoring the hotel 5 stars. They had posted an average of 11 reviews on TripAdvisor and they were overwhelmingly 'Type 1'. Then we looked at the 1 star reviewers. They had posted an average of under 3 reviews each - they were almost all 'Type 2'.

We then went on to strip out the 'habitual reviewers' who had posted a 1 star (for this purpose we counted reviewers with more than 20 reviews as 'habitual') the average came right down to 1.4.

Conclusion:

• Habitual TripAdvisor reviewers will post a review whatever...
• Dissatisfied guests who wouldn't normally dream of posting a review will post a review on TripAdvisor if they are not given a route they prefer*...

Dialogue is giving our client's dissatisfied guests a route they prefer. They actively want to communicate with the hotel, they want the hotel to given an opportunity to apologise/explain and, in the overwhelming majority of cases, to retain their custom.

We know Dialogue works, now we (and you) know more about why it works.

*Look at the 'helpful' votes - aaarrgh!