Tuesday 6 August 2013

Understanding the psychology behind TripAdvisor reviewers' behaviour


To effectively manage your reputation on TripAdvisor it is first important to understand why (and from whom) you are getting reviews.


TripAdvisor reviewers break down into many subgroups, but the two main ones are:
  • dedicated TripAdvisor reviewers: who review every hotel they stay in
  • unhappy guests: who rarely, if ever, post unless they were not satisfied
Here are some representative examples taken from a single hotel's positive reviews over the last month:


And here is a sample (again, representative) of the same hotel's negative reviewers:



There are two very strong messages here:
  1. Regular TripAdvisor reviewers will post a review of your hotel - come what may
  2. Guests who have never posted to TripAdvisor before will post a negative review if they are not happy
There is overlap: some, like Victoria JK, will post both positives and negatives:


 But a significant number (like j80jsd) will only post when they're not happy:


This goes a very long way to explaining why Dialogue works so effectively:
  • Guests like 'j80jsd' are captured by Dialogue and will bring their complaint direct to you in private. Why? because they don't post to TripAdvisor to help their fellow travellers find great hotels, they post because they are unhappy (do you think 'j80jsd' has only ever stayed in 5 hotels and has been plain unlucky)? They just want the hotel to know that their expectations weren't fulfilled.
  • Guests like 'VictoriaJK' are also highly likely to respond through Dialogue, but are even more likely to go on to post any positive reviews they write through Dialogue to Tripadvisor afterwards. Dialogue stands a very good chance of choking off any negative review she might have been considering writing
  • Guests like 'Mme_X', who review every hotel they stay in (and write overwhelmingly positive reviews) are also highly likely to re-post the review they write to you through Dialogue to TripAdvisor...



One final point: note how many 'helpful' votes the negative reviewers get, compared with the lovely 'Mme_X' above; it's so important to divert these negative reviews, not just to keep your ranking up, but to prevent potential guests being put off booking your hotel. One negative review does so much more harm than just impacting your ranking.

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