Getting the Most Out of TripAdvisor

TripAdvisor offers a variety of tools to help hotels cast a wider net when attracting guests. Of course, each of these tools is designed at directing traffic to a property's TripAdvisor profile, but with over 260 million monthly visitors, that isn't a bad thing. TripAdvisor provides plenty of cost-effective (mostly free!) and easy ways to capitalize on this traffic and to stay on top of the increasingly competitive travel industry. TripAdvisor's profiles are free and often created long before the hotel realizes it. Leaving them unmanaged can be potentially harmful to a property's reputation. Taking control over these pages is simple and the first step in attracting new guests and strengthening relationships with existing ones. Once up and running, TripAdvisor can help manage and promote the growth of a properties profile in several ways.

TripAdvisor is at its core, a review site. All the tools and functionality they offer are useless without the reviews to back them up. The more engaged travelers will turn to the internet and leave reviews after their stay, but most guests will need some encouragement. To help with this, TripAdvisor offers hotels many ways to increase awareness of the hotel's profile. The most basic of which come in the form of physical signage to place in the hotel lobby, or custom business cards to be handed to guests at checkout. The first 250 of these cards are provided for free and are inexpensive when it's time to reorder. With the physical reminders covers, TripAdvisor's Review Express can handle the digital side, through email reminders.

So now that the reviews are pouring in, its time to showcase them. TripAdvisor offers several tools called "Widgets" to help increase traffic to a properties profile and highlight existing reviews. These Review Widgets allow hotels to embed TripAdvisor's guest reviews onto their website and keep prospective guests from navigating away to find more information. This will help drive direct bookings by keeping potential guests away from OTA sponsored ads. Options are available to display the most recent reviews, overall score, or highlight how many "Excellent" reviews have been submitted. To complement these widgets, TripAdvisor offers a similar tool for hotels looking to improve the functionality of their Facebook pages.

Visit TripAdvisor to see a full list of their widgets and the different ways they can help promote any hotel.