If you’re seeking to increase your visibility and therefore attract a maximum number of bookings, guest reviews are now your best weapon. Indeed, TripAdvisor states that 53% of web users won’t make a booking without having read guest reviews of the establishment first. It’s undeniable that expanding your online presence is a key step towards reaching a wide audience, but what about your website? It represents your ‘shop window’ and, once a potential guest arrives on your page, what are the methods you use to lead them to make a reservation?
Beyond the importance of displaying guest reviews on your website, let’s take a look at the benefits to be gained from a widget in terms of generating bookings and strengthening trust from your clientele.
Keep visitors on your site by strengthening their trust in your hotel
Guest reviews are now available on a wide variety of online platforms, and there is a growing trend for hoteliers to display them on their site. So, what impact does this have on your guests, and on you?
The guest journey can prove to be a complex one, especially given all the possibilities that are now available online: social networks, review platforms, OTAs and, of course, your own website! Displaying reviews on your site will increase your prospective guests’ trust immensely. It shows that you take an interest in guest satisfaction and that you are always willing to listen to their feedback. But that’s not all – think about the path your guests take during the search process. Once they arrive on your website, you need to do everything it takes to secure that direct booking! If a visitor to your site has the possibility of reading through guest reviews, there’s no reason for them to leave to go and look on sites like Booking.com or TripAdvisor, which decreases your chances of securing the booking or have the guest attracted by a different hotel. As well as displaying reviews, including a satisfaction rating, or an average score, will help to reassure visitors to your site.
Generate more direct bookings by guiding the visitor on your website
At Customer Alliance, we bring these two elements together in a widget. This widget displays important information such as your satisfaction rating (based on an average score calculated from various reviews from various different platforms) and the number of reviews collected from the different platforms you use, and therefore helps to catch your visitors’ attention. The aim behind it is to guide the visitor towards making a booking. Thanks to the call to action integrated into the widget, they have a direct gateway to your booking engine.
Not enough? It’s true that some visitors to your site may not instinctively head towards making a booking, but that’s why the widget offers an alternative: to redirect visitors towards a personalised certificate for your establishment, where they can read through the details of your guest reviews and the scores gathered from the Customer Alliance questionnaire and the various online platforms. Again, there is a call to action to prompt visitors to your site to make a booking. That way, you’re giving yourself the best chance of attracting a maximum number of direct bookings.
To sum up…
It’s now vital to pay careful attention to managing your guest reviews. Developing an online presence by displaying reviews on several different platforms is certainly an effective way of attracting more clients. Integrating reviews into your site through a widget has quickly become a competitive advantage to guide the booking process for your guests, but also to strengthen their trust in your site and your hotel.
