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Tripadvisor isn’t available to all businesses. The general listings include accommodations, things to do, restaurants and vacation rentals.
Tripadvisor may have already set up a page of your business. First, check to see if they have here. If they have and you have not yet claimed it, select the “claim your free listing” button and follow the instructions. You will need to provide a phone number they can either call or text for verification.
If there isn’t an active business listing, the first step to getting started on TripAdvisor is to create your business listing.
Create Listing
Before you start entering your business’s information, TripAdvisor will ask you a couple of questions about you. The site asks for your name, your position, and your email address. Make sure that this is an inbox you check regularly, as this will be how TripAdvisor will communicate with you.
Enter Your Business Information
Drop Your Business Map Location – In this section, you’ll have the option to drop a pin near your business’s entrance on the map. This is meant to help travelers more easily locate your business. If your business doesn’t have an entrance, drop a pin at the “geographic center”.
Add Contact Information
Provide Business Details
Describe Your Business – This description can help show off your services and your brand’s unique personality. In this section, add other information such as your hours of operation, whether your business is okay for children and groups, and things that will help your business attraction.
Add a Business Profile Photo – Since this photo will serve as a first impression for your business, be sure to add a high-definition picture that shows off the strength of your services.
Wait for Verification – After you hit “Submit”, TripAdvisor editors will review your application and then send you a confirmation email. The process takes around 5 business days. Once your application is accepted, you’ll be able to respond to customer reviews, update your business information, answer customer questions, and add photos and videos within TripAdvisor’s Management Center.
Once you’ve claimed your TripAdvisor listing, it’s important to optimize it. An optimized listing can help your business look more appealing to prospective customers and rank higher in search results.
Add Photos – Just like with your profile picture, make sure that you’re adding high-definition photos that show off the best of your business’s services. After all, a picture tells a thousand words.
Keep Your Information Up-to-date – If your business moves addresses or changes phone numbers, be sure to update your TripAdvisor listing. Remember, inaccurate listing information confuses your customers and hurts your business in search results. Remember, Google values consistency in business listings.
Adding Keywords – While you’re thinking about writing, it’s a good idea to add targeted keywords to your description. Don’t overdo it and stuff them into every nook and cranny. But, if what sets your business apart is that you’re a family-friendly hotel, or you’re known as a vegetarian restaurant, make sure those terms are included in your description in a way that helps readers and search engines understand the specific nature of your business. It can help you appear in long-tail searches inside TripAdvisor and potentially Google.
Increase the Number of Reviews
Send Emails and Texts that link to tour TripAdvisor listing so customer can find you. Remember, customers are most likely to leave a review when the process is easy. Most of your customers are more than happy to leave a review since they understand all of the ways a review can help your business. Very few people are going to look up your business and leave a review on every possible channel. So if you want more reviews on TripAdvisor, it’s important to send a message to your customer that links directly to your profile.
Be Timely with Review Requests
Customers are most likely to leave reviews when you are timely with your request. If a customer gets a review request a month after dining with you, they might not even really remember how they felt at the time. Be sure to send your review requests on the same day that the transaction took place, when your business is fresh in your customer’s mind.
Don’t Give Incentives for Reviews
TripAdvisor does not allow incentives for reviews. TripAdvisor has a dedicated team that looks out for suspicious reviews. If you’re caught incentivizing reviews, the reviews will be marked as suspicious and your reviews will be removed.
Stickers & Embedding Code
You can order stickers to put up on the door or by the register that remind customers to leave you a review, or you can look into embedding a TripAdvisor widget on your website, which allows users to see your review score and other content. This is particularly useful if you’re using some of TripAdvisor’s paid Business Advantage tools, allowing a selected featured review to always show up at the top of the list.
You can request stic
Respond To Reviews
Click the “Reviews” tab in the top menu.
Select “Respond to Reviews.”
Click the TripAdvisor review you want to respond to in the left-hand sidebar.
Enter your review response into the form provided.
Click submit.
Responding to Negative Reviews
It’s important to respond to negative reviews before they drive potential customers away. Here are a few best practices to include in a response.
Address the Reviewer
Say Thank You
Apologize and Sympathize – It may not even be your fault, but it’s good to acknowledge their perspective.
Take Responsibility
Make Things Right
Take the Conversation Offline
Ask for Second Chance – Once you have satisfactorily remedied the situation with the customer, politely request they delete the bad review.
In the Business Details section of the Management Center, you have opportunities to include a lot of information about your property, including price range, amenities, location and more. Take advantage of that as much as possible. For example, don’t miss an opportunity to capitalize on someone searching for a place with free breakfast or a pool.
Users searching for specific amenities are a smaller volume than the broad searches, but they’re also a higher likelihood to convert if they find you. Making sure your amenity info is comprehensive can provide you with an advantage against competitors. If your listing is incomplete, then you’ll get filtered out of searches where you would’ve belonged, and that’s always going to result in missed opportunities to convert a booking.
There are different requirements for B&Bs/Inns than there are for hotels. You’ll also be stacked up against a different competitive set in the listings. Be mindful of the differences in categories because some smaller properties might gain visibility by listing as an inn rather than a hotel, depending on circumstances. The requirements to be a B&B/Inn are:
1) Daily housekeeping included in the room rate.
2) Management is present on-site daily.
Hotels require the following:
1) 24-hour front desk
2) Daily housekeeping included in the room rate
3) Private bathroom for each unit
4) No more than a three-night minimum stay.
TripAdvisor’s research suggests you should have at least 30 photos uploaded to your listing. Be sure to include photos of common areas (lobby, pool, restaurant/bar, meeting rooms) and individual rooms (especially if you have different room types at different price points). By the time you’re done, you should have a couple of dozen photos that you’ve contributed.
If you’ve just remodeled, make sure you’ve got updated images. If the property hasn’t changed recently, you might try deleting some of your images and then re-uploading them to look fresher to the system, which will help keep them visible in competition with new user-generated content.
For your primary photo, ensure to select one that grabs travelers’ attention and represents your property. TripAdvisor provides some tips for taking better property photos.
If you have deals available on your website, then promoting the same deal specifically on TripAdvisor can help increase the amount of visibility you have inside of the platform by allowing for more discovery of your business locally and regionally through the special offers category. However, you’ll need to be a participant in the Business Advantage program (paid promotion) in order to have this option available.
One of the paid tools that are available for independent properties is Instant Booking, which allows you to take advantage of the visibility you have on TripAdvisor to drive more bookings more quickly. TripAdvisor has partnered with a range of booking platforms so that the connection is paired with your existing provider rather than requiring additional set up.
What’s the catch?
There’s no upfront cost, although you do need to double check that you meet the eligibility requirements. The price for participation is a flat commission fee paid per booking, so TripAdvisor, like most OTAs, will take a slice of the action (12% or 15% depending on the tier you choose) in exchange for the incremental booking growth.
Great dining experiences are consistently ranked among travelers’ top reasons to travel. But even if travelers are not visiting for a bucket-list meal, they still need to eat three square meals a day, so getting visibility on one of the largest hubs of travel content online, will only help grow your restaurant’s clientele.
Beyond the general tips included in the general article about TripAdvisor best practices, here are some things restaurants should keep in mind to improve their visibility on TripAdvisor.
When it comes to digital curb appeal, having a copy of your menu (or an example menu if you’re a place that changes dishes regularly) can help potential diners better understand whether you’re the right place for them or not. Keep in mind that if a reader is closely comparing a couple of similar restaurants, they’re more likely to choose the place where they have the best picture of what to expect. That’s why they’re doing all the homework in the first place — no one likes to make the wrong choice!
There are two ways you can get your menu added to your TripAdvisor listing. Under the Manage Listing tab, choose “Menu,” paste a link to the menu on your website and click submit. Easy. For restaurants that use SinglePlatform, Yext, or Locu, there is an easy integration that will automatically pull your information there through to your TripAdvisor listing. Note that if you sign up with one of those providers, it will typically take 10-14 days for the menu to appear.
Yes, this is partly covered by the “Take Care of the Basics” section above, but there’s some nuance to Cuisine types that you can use to your advantage. Because you can select multiple cuisine types, it’s easy to increase your relevance for some long-tail searches (lower-volume and higher-specificity) where a person isn’t just looking for restaurants but a particular kind of food. Are you an Italian restaurant that’s also fine dining and vegetarian-friendly? Make sure you appear in all three of those query types by maxing out the number of cuisines your restaurant offers. Don’t choose things that aren’t relevant to you, that might increase your visibility, but it’s not likely to attract eyeballs from people who actually want what you’re serving.
There is a lot of interesting data you can find within the TripAdvisor platform that can help you understand how well your listing is doing and what your competitors are up to. You’ll get a snapshot of listing data in the Performance Trends section on the Management Centre homepage, which captures month-over-month data for your listing, including summaries of page performance, review performance, and customer actions.
To really geek out, click on the “See All” and dive into some of those individual sections. One of the interesting items inside the Performance Dashboard is the section called “Visitors Also Viewed,” which gives you a look at the nearby businesses that potential customers also looked at on the site. Click on “See Competitor Details” to take a deeper dive into that information. Capturing snapshots of that data and tracking it over time is a pro-move that will allow you to better understand seasonal trends and/or the impact of specific marketing tactics.
There is a unique tool available for restaurants to communicate with diners without that information being public. This allows them to ask questions, provide a specific piece of feedback or context about their review. But rather than leave it in the review (or in your Management Response), the conversation can take place in your respective inboxes. This can be a valuable tool for managing the reviews and ratings you receive (which impacts your visibility).
If you’ve claimed your listing and are the sole owner associated, then you’ll be set up automatically.
If you have multiple account owners or haven’t claimed your listing, then there are a couple of quick steps to take. If you haven’t claimed your listing, that is the essential first step in the process. For locations with multiple owners, you’ll need to set up the point of contact. First, log into your account, and go to the Management Center. Under Business Details, select Messaging Settings. Check the box to Turn on Direct Messaging and indicate which account owner is the point of contact. From there, you can check out the inbox by clicking in on the icon in the top right corner of the Management Center.
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