As a follow-up to our recent posts on Evaluating Your Paid Listings and Taking Charge of Your Online Marketing, we presented two sessions on Google Analytics at the recent Innkeeping Conference for the Professional Association of Innkeepers International (PAII) at its annual conference in Little Rock, Arkansas.

At the conference, time made it necessary to hurry through some of the slides, near the end of the presentations, in particular. As a result, we are posting the slide decks here, so you can revisit them and copy down any necessary information, links, etc.

The first of these is the session called “Measuring the Success of Your Online Marketing”, and the slides are below.

Closing the circle in this series on the process guests use to book lodging properties is what WIHP Hotel Marketing calls the Second Moment of Truth – the arrival of the guest at your property. We have already discussed the four-step booking decision process, how the guest becomes aware of your property (the Discovery or Stimulus step), how guests make the decision to visit your website (the Zero Moment of Truth), and the process of deciding to book with your property (the First Moment of Truth). In this article we consider the guest at your property (and beyond).

Ready to share?

How do you get word of mouth recommendations that will bring more guests?

If review sites and social sharing are the sources of discovery, then we definitely want our guests to have a positive experience, and to share that experience. How do we go about doing that?

1. The Positive Experience

People usually have a good experience when it meets or exceeds their expectations. Conversely, when the experience falls short of their expectations, it isn’t usually a good experience.

How are expectations set for prospective guests? Proceeding through the booking process we’ve been discussing, some expectation is created by the initial recommendations or reviews. These are refined further by the visit to your website and booking process. The Second Moment of Truth is when the guest arrives at your property and learns whether or not those expectations will be met.

What can you do to set expectations?

You can not do much to affect the word of mouth recommendations, but you can affect online reviews. You can respond to the reviews to

• thank guests for positive comments,
• clarify any misunderstandings, or
• explain (and show sensitivity to) any problems.

Photos have the most impact, both because they tell the story most completely, and because they can be viewed quickly. On your website you can set expectations by making sure the photos accurately show what the guest should expect. Naturally we all want to show our property to best advantage, and to use the best photographs we can in order to do so. However, if your rooms are on the small side, and you use and extreme wide-angle lens to make them look a bit larger, you are setting the expectation that the guest will have a larger room than you are actually providing. This is a recipe for the guest to be disappointed.

Make sure the website information is current. If you no longer provide an amenity, make sure your website doesn’t say you have it. If you’re close to an area attraction, certainly say so. If you’re not too close, don’t pretend you are!

Make sure your service exceeds expectations, wherever possible. You already know how to do that! There is no substitute for a guest who checks out saying, “You’ve thought of everything!”

2. Getting the recommendation

Ask for it! If you send a follow-up email, be sure to include a gentle request for a review on TripAdvisor (or any other site you feel is appropriate). Don’t be rude, or hit the guest over the head with it. Please don’t try to make them feel guilty (“If you don’t review us, we’ll go out of business”), but do ask, and ask nicely.

Let people know about your presence on the networks they are on (Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Goole+, or whatever). Ask them to follow you. Ask them to recommend you. That said, don’t forget to check the rules of the review sites you request guests to use – some discourage asking for reviews, and even penalize you for rewarding positive reviews.

Not only do their recommendations reach their friends (who may remember to check them again when they plan their next trip), but they also will appear in searches for a long time to come. One of the aspects of posting things on the web, for better or for worse, is that you have no control over how long they remain available on a site operated by someone other than you.

Going around again

The cycle has the excellent potential of repeating itself. Potential guests discover your property through reviews, social media and word of mouth. They investigate further with search engines, reviews and maps. Once they have the basics, they visit your website, where your excellent site quickly convinces them to book. Once at your property, the experience is so good that they can’t wait to share it with their friends, family, and other connections. Those people learn of your property, and the cycle begins again.

By having a good presence on social media (the platforms where your target demographic(s) are found, of course) and on review sites, encourages discovery of your property. Good search engine, local, maps and review presence encourages the investigating guest to dig deeper and visit your website. A site that shows the guest the three things they are looking for (value, location and comfort) encourages them to book. And a great experience (supported by a website that has accurately presented your property – especially in the areas of value, location and comfort), encourages the guest to share that experience with the next potential guest.

This is the fourth article in a series examining how B&B guests proceed through the decision process for booking a stay. Based largely on research from WIHP Hotel Marketing, the first article describes the four-step process for booking, the second describes how a guest discovers your property, and the third examines how to provide information to get the guest to your website. This article discusses how to get the conversion – to capture the booking – once the guest has come to your site.

What is the purpose of your website? Have you ever given that some thought? Is it to (a) show off your beautiful property, (b) get people to call you for more information, (c) get people to call to book, (d) get people to book online, or (e) other? For most lodging properties, we would venture to say that the primary purpose is to get people to book online, and, secondarily, to call to book. Is it doing those things well?

The Guest Arrives at Your Website

Our guest has decided where they want to go for their getaway, they have discovered your property (and, probably, up to 10 others), they have done some initial research and learned a little about your property, and have now arrived at your website. WIHP calls this the First Moment of Truth.

What happens in the next few seconds will determine whether you get the booking or not.

What is the Guest Looking For?

Again, WIHP’s research indicates that the prospective guest is looking for three things:

• Value
• Location
• Comfort

They also found two other things that are very important: Quality websites sell better, and better booking engine design results in more bookings.

How should your website be designed?

A search on “web design mistakes” will yield many articles on poor choices in website design. Some even contradict each other. As mentioned in our previous post, Acorn Internet Services has prepared a series of checklists, accompanying their Smarter Innkeeper Series, to assist with selecting a web design company and/or SEO firm. The first article in that series includes a checklist to ask your prospective web developer, and makes a good list of things you should be planning to address with your website.

There are lots of examples across the internet of websites that are attractive and effective. For some examples, view the portfolios of design firms in our industry, such as Acorn Internet Services, Whitestone Marketing, or Insideout Solutions. While you probably don’t want your site to look just like another site, you’ll notice some similar elements on each site designed by these professionals. Large, high quality photos of the property, the rooms (comfort) and of the food (and other amenities, if appropriate). Clear, straightforward, navigation. Clear statements of rates and what you are getting for them (value). Clear descriptions of location and nearby attractions or points of interest.

If your website looks less “polished” than the competition (who may not be your neighbor, but in another location, entirely), you are not encouraging your visitor to book. If you aren’t showing them the things they are looking for (value, location and comfort), you are making it harder for them to find the information they are seeking.

Finally, if your booking engine makes it difficult to see what they want, and to easily and conveniently proceed through the booking process, you are making it less likely that they will complete the booking process (you can validate this using Google Analytics and checking to see where the visitor leaves the booking system, but that is a topic for another post).

What should your website do?

The guest has chosen about 10 properties to consider, and will visit the websites of all of them. Each will have 3-7 seconds to answer their questions. The questions will primarily be (1) is this property a good value? (2) is this property well-located for my planned activities? and (3) is this going to provide a desirable level of comfort?

There may be other questions in the mind of an individual guest, but virtually all prospective guests will be asking these three questions. Consequently, your website must answer them, and answer them quickly.

1. Your design must look professional and current (the portfolios of the industry web design firms listed above will show you what is both professional and current).
2. Your site must load very quickly (this is a priority for Google, and the slower it loads, the less time a guest will wait to see if you answer their questions).
3. Your photos must be professional, beautiful, and must show the comfort and the value the guest will find at your property.
4. Your rates must be prominently displayed, so the guest can easily see the value you are providing.
5. Your location – especially your proximity to the most commonly visited attractions and points of interest – must be easy to find.

If your site answers these questions for the guest, and does it quickly, and if your booking engine makes the booking process clean, simple and easy (including on mobile devices!), you will be capturing the booking you are seeking.

Our first post in this series provided an overview of how guests find and book a lodging property, based on research from WIHP, a hotel marketing agency. The four step process assumes the future guest has selected a destination area and then proceeds through the steps of (1) discovery of a particular property, (2) seeking information about the property to see if it is a good prospect (the zero moment of truth), (3) the guest on your website (the first moment of truth), and (4) the guest at your property (the second moment of truth). Our second post discussed the process by which a guest “discovers” (or learns of) your property as a possible place to stay.

Our topic today, then, is the “Zero Moment of Truth,” or the time when the guest has decided on a location to visit, has learned of your property as a possible place to stay, but has not yet seen your website, and wants to find out more about your property.

Another 7.3% seek information from a review site (such as TripAdvisor, Yelp, etc.). After that the numbers fall off radically for travel guides (3%) and social media sites (0.8%). Just a side note – if you’re counting on your social media sites (Facebook, Google Plus, etc.) to provide the information, at the current time you’re reaching less than 1% of those who want to find you.

We would ordinarily expect Google to be the most commonly used search engine, so we won’t be surprised to find that it is. Although many articles remind us not to forget Yahoo, Bing, and others, and other articles talk about Google losing market share at the expense of Bing, in particular, these statistics don’t match up with the results of WIHP’s research. They found that 89.8% of searches leading to a property’s website came from Google, while Yahoo and Bing brought 4% and 3.6%, respectively.

Before booking, the average guest will have viewed 10 different hotel websites over 6 days, and will have visited the one they ultimately choose at least 3-4 times. This is where your competition truly exists. Your goal, at this point, is to be one of the sites (perhaps the top site) the guest will consider, and to get them to visit your website.

We talked about how to help yourself be found on TripAdvisor in our previous post, and much the same advice would apply to other review sites (though no others provide the exposure in the lodging market that TripAdvisor does). Consequently, our focus here should be on search engines – particularly Google – and map sites.

How do guests find information through search engines?

Try it yourself. What search terms would a guest, knowing the location and the name of your inn, use to search? If you’re having trouble, pick a place you’d like to travel, find the name of a property there, and try to find out more about the property using your favorite search engine. Then use those search terms for your own property and location.

What do you see in the results? In the case of our Freeport Maine bed and breakfast (while signed in to Google, which may affect the results), I see our website, then our TripAdvisor reviews, then a couple of B&B directories, a news article we are mentioned in, etc. Verify these results while logged out of Google. They may also differ by your location, so you may want to have someone repeat the search using a different location.

One thing you’ll see in all (or nearly all) the search results is a description of the page the result will link to. Although Google, at least, reserves the right to re-write the description, you can “help” by putting a well-written description META tag in the head section of a page. If your description provides an accurate summary of the content of the page, it may well be the description that is used in the search results.

Bear in mind that just because your own website is the first result in the search results, that does not necessarily mean your guests will click on it first! They may choose one of the B&B directories, TripAdvisor, or something else. Our goal is to provide information for our future guests in all of these sources, so they’ll find it regardless of where they look.

Getting found on search engines (search engine optimization or SEO) is a topic that would make an extensive series in its own right. Fundamentally it breaks down into on-page SEO (signals on the page that help the search engine determine how to index the content), and ongoing SEO efforts (such as building incoming links to your website, dealing with local listings, maps, etc.). We are planning to break out this topic, and part of the next post in this series (on the First Moment of Truth) relating to your website, itself, into a short series of its own. Consequently we’ll just hit some of the high points here. Bear in mind that our brief discussion of SEO is not meant to say it is not important. Just the contrary. It is so important that it deserves a more complete treatment than we can include in this post.

In an excellent series entitled “The Smarter Innkeeper”, Acorn Internet Services has devoted two of the three topics to on-page SEO and ongoing SEO (the third point is on the web design itself, which we cover in our next post). In each post is a checklist of tasks you can perform (or have done for you) to make your website more easily found by the search engines and to make it more likely to be indexed for the relevant search terms. The checklists are written as something you might ask your web designer or SEO firm, to be sure they don’t miss anything, but they will do very nicely as a list of the tasks you should plan to perform, as well.

Both of the two SEO checklists make reference to creating and maintaining local listings. In addition to any local listings sites, such as Chambers of Commerce, innkeeping associations, area marketing groups, etc., the search engines have their own local listings pages. Properly setting up and maintaining these pages will help you be found – especially on the mapping websites.

What about maps?

If you have followed the steps on the SEO checklists, and your local setup is correct, you do want to be sure your location is correctly specified on mapping sites. Most will allow you to claim your listing (you did that long ago, didn’t you?), then to edit the location if it is not correct. Again, most will allow you to specify business name, phone, website URL, etc., as well as other details, much as the local sites will. Keep in mind that the search engines have a specific format for business names, addresses and telephone numbers, so you want to follow those formats and keep the information the same from place to place. If the information is not identical (for example, saying “B&B” in one location and “Bed and Breakfast” in another), you run the risk that a search engine (which is only a computer, after all) will think they are two different businesses.

When your guest searches on a map, it is likely that they want to know how close (meaning how convenient) you are to a particular location. To help them out, tell them how close you are to various attractions. There is no substitute for making it easy for the guest to find the information they are seeking!

If we’ve done all these things, we’ve made it easy for the prospective guest to learn more about our property before they come to our website. In fact, if we’ve done our job well, we have whetted their appetite to see our website! We’ll talk about what happens on the website in our next post.

In our previous post we introduced the four step process (identified by WIHP a hotel marketing firm) of a guest finding, and staying at, a lodging property, then feeding the beginning of the cycle again by telling others. In this, and the next few posts, we will break down the components and see how you can more effectively help future guests find you.

As a refresher, the four steps are

1. Discovery or stimulus (where the guest learns of a hotel and gets interested)
2. Zero moment of truth (the guest begins to research the hotel)
3. First moment of truth (guest finds the hotel website and begins to determine if this is what they want), and
4. Second moment of truth (guest arrives at the property and is either happy or disappointed – which will sometimes result in that reaction being shared)

We’re going to focus on the first topic in this article: How does a prospective guest discover your lodging property?

The semi-automatic reaction in today’s world would be that, of course, a prospective guest learns about your property through a search engine (Google, Bing, Yahoo, or others). That is not what the data indicates. The results of WIHP’s inquiries indicate that the guests are most likely to learn about a lodging property from friends or family, an online travel site, or TripAdvisor. Specifically, their statistics indicate that nearly one-third of people who learn about a property discover it from friends or family (32.7%), followed by roughly a quarter who discover it from Online Travel Agents (OTA’s – 27.9%) and TripAdvisor (23.1%). Other sources have far smaller influence (see the infographic on WIHP’s site).

If you think about how you would find lodging for your getaway, this makes a good deal of sense. Most of us, I suspect, would decide first on the destination (“I want to go to Maine” or “I want to go to France”), not on the lodging property. Only after the destination has been selected (at least tentatively selected), and we’ve checked to see that there are things we want to do or see there, do we move on to the details of making the travel arrangements.

This indicates that, whether based on recommendations of friends and family, or other sources, the destination is selected first, then the accommodations. Why is that important? It greatly affects two things: (1) they type of search people make to find your property (more on that topic in our next article), and (2) the specific information your website should contain (for example, if you have relevant information on activities in your area, your site may come up during the search for information about the area).

With this in mind, how can we increase the likelihood that prospective guests will find us? Let’s look at the three ways they tend to locate a property, and see where we can make it easier for them to find us.

1. Friends and Family

Family is, well, family. But the definition of who is a friend, and the way we make/find friends today, has changed significantly with social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Google+ and many other platforms. A few years ago friends were people we knew in our neighborhood, or met at work or within other social settings. Today we add to that our online friends, whether or not we have ever met in person or spoken by phone. Our network of friends is many times larger, and far more widespread, than ever before.

So the question becomes, how do those family and far-flung friends learn of our property, so they can recommend it to our prospective guests? Perhaps they have stayed at our property in the past, and have shared their impressions with friends and family. To the extent they haven’t stayed with us, in most cases they have heard about our property from someone who has stayed with us, or is otherwise interested in our property.

How can we improve our reach to these people? We can think of at least a couple of ways.

First, encourage every guest to share their story of how they enjoyed their stay (hopefully this will be positive comments). If they will share with their network of friends and family, offline or online, it has the potential for a huge reach, and will help to reach those prospective guests.

Second, encourage them to submit reviews on one or more review sites. Be a little careful, as some sites (Yelp comes to mind) forbid you to ask for reviews, while others, like TripAdvisor, encourage you to do so. In addition to these well-known review sites, most bed and breakfast directories allow reviews, and reviews can be placed directly on Google and on several of the OTA’s. Even a “Like” on Facebook or a “+1″ on Google will help pass on a favorable impression of your property (and may help with search presence).

2. OTAs and Directories

As mentioned in our earlier article, we think that, for the bed & breakfast or small lodging property, online directories should be included with OTAs as a source of discovery. How can you use these tools to help your prospective guests find you? In this case it should be somewhat evident, but here are our thoughts:

• Be sure you are listed on the directories which place well in search results for your area. Most directories show up well in most areas, but some are better than others in specific areas. Go to Google, Bing and Yahoo and search for lodging in your area. Try “bed and breakfast your area”, “your area bed and breakfast”, the same substituting “b&b” for bed and breakfast, do it with and without the “&”, and substitute “lodging” and “hotel”. See what directories appear on the first page of the results (even if it is their listing for a competitor). Be sure you’re on those directories.
• If you’re not already, consider getting on the OTA’s. Bookings through them come at a high price (commission), but the exposure you get may be worth it. You can negotiate a specific arrangement with a Global Distribution System (GDS) provider, or work through some booking system providers, like ResNexus or RezOvation. Tnooz publishes daily reports on which travel sites have the highest market share in different markets. Choose OTA’s with strong penetration in your target markets.

3. TripAdvisor

TripAdvisor has its own way of doing things, and many innkeepers are not happy working with them. Regardless of your views of their system, TripAdvisor is a fact of the innkeeping life today. The best thing to do is to try to work with their system, to help your prospective guests find your property.

First of all, be sure to set up your property information in the TripAdvisor Management Center. You don’t have to like the way it works (we aren’t particularly fond of it) to use it. Make sure your information is current and correct – especially your contact information. As an aside, be sure your business name, address and telephone number are set out exactly as they are in your Google Place Page.

By default, TripAdvisor includes basic information on your property, but no link to your website, and no phone number. To help prospective guests find you, our second suggestion is to consider getting a Business Listing (paid), which will result in TripAdvisor displaying your telephone number and a link to your website. This is especially valuable to the mobile user, who can just click the phone number to call you.

While innkeepers of smaller properties are sometimes reluctant to spend the money it would require for a TripAdvisor business listing, and for the commissions on OTA sites, or even for some of the directories, if the objective is to increase visibility and therefore help your prospective guests find you (and through that process increase your occupancy), these are the areas where the prospective guest is looking, so they are also the areas most likely to produce results.

A few of you may have noticed that we seem to have taken a bit of a hiatus over the past several weeks. In fact, our Freeport Maine Bed & Breakfast had a very busy summer, and there wasn’t much time for About the Inn writing. Now that our busy summer and fall foliage seasons are behind us, it appears things will be back on a more even keel, and we hope to be able to publish more regularly.

How do you attract B&B guests? In the past several years, most smaller lodging properties have become aware of the importance of attracting guests through an online presence (oddly, though, some still seem to question the need – or maybe they question the long-term viability – of an internet presence). Gone, or nearly gone, are the days of buying print or television ads in huge volume, in hopes that a few visitors will be enticed to become guests.

For the smaller properties, in particular, this is a good thing, as few can afford the high prices charged for print advertising, let alone the several additional orders of magnitude for television campaigns – all for ads for which there is little hope of tracking their success, and for which industry analysts say the return on investment (ROI) is very small indeed.

So, then, all a small business needs to do is find a way to slap up a small website, and all the marketing is done, right? Unfortunately, many small properties seem to have adopted exactly that strategy, and are beginning to pay the price in reduced occupancy.

Print media (with the exception, to some degree, of direct mail), and for that matter television, tries to sell by sending an uninvited message to a large, but generally arbitrary, audience. The primary reason online marketing is more effective, is because the prospective guest is looking for you. They are, by definition, part of your target market. They are seeking exactly what you are offering: some type of lodging for a temporary purpose.

How do you reach the prospective guest?

It seems like an over simplification, but in order to get the prospective guest, seeking lodging like yours, to connect with your property and make a booking, you need to be found where they are looking. Which means that you need to know where they are looking, and be found there.

Where are they looking?

We usually begin by assuming that the guest has decided to come to your area, and needs to find lodging. This is because there are many, many different ways the prospective guest may decide to come to a region. However, you can play a role in this, by getting information about the area in front of the guest – either by more traditional means such as print or television, or by having that type of information on your web site.

Once the decision is made to come to an area, the question of lodging must arise.

According to WIHP, a hotel marketing firm, there are four distinct steps in the process of deciding on a lodging property: discovery or stimulus (where the guest learns of a hotel and gets interested), zero moment of truth (the guest begins to research the hotel), first moment of truth (guest finds the hotel website and begins to determine if this is what they want), and second moment of truth (guest arrives at the property and is either happy or disappointed). There is little doubt that these steps apply more or less exactly for smaller properties, as well.

Let’s look a bit more closely at these four steps:

1. Discovery or Stimulus

How does the prospective guest find out about a lodging property they may want to consider? WIHP’s data indicates that the most likely source of information is friends or family, followed by online travel agents (known as OTAs, including Expedia, Travelocity, Priceline, Booking.com, and the like), then TripAdvisor, and then, to a much lesser degree, other sources like Facebook, Travel Agents, Magazines, etc.

Because we’re interested in the smaller lodging properties, we would suggest that bed and breakfast directories could be included with the OTAs, at least for the guest who is interested in considering bed and breakfast lodging.

2. Zero Moment of Truth

How does the guest research the lodging property he/she is interested in? The data from WIHP indicates that nearly 73% will use search engines to find the hotel. Did you pick up on that? Most of our search engine optimization is around industry-specific keywords, but most of our prospective guests are searching by the name of the hotel!

Of the remaining 27% or so, guests will search map pages (9.6%), review sites (7.3%), travel guides (3.0%) and social media sites (0.8%) to find the lodging property.

3. First Moment of Truth

Once the guest arrives on the property’s website, you have between 3 and 7 seconds to help them decide to stay at the property. The average visitor will have looked at 10 other property websites, read reviews, checked rates, and verified the location on a map.

WIHP says the guest wants to know:

• will this save me money?
• will this save me time?
• will this make my life better?

For the property, this translates to:

• Is this the best value I can get?
• Is this located near the points I am interested in?
• Is the comfort going to live up to my standards?

How your website stacks up in answering these questions for the guest determines whether or not they will book.

4. Second Moment of Truth

When the guest arrives they will either be pleased with their selection of your property, or they will be disappointed. In either case, the results are likely to be posted on social media and review sites, and shared with friends and family. In exceptional cases, they may even appear in blog posts.

When you consider the likelihood of these results, whether positive or negative, being shared with friends and family, as well as the review sites and social media connections, you can see that these results will also become part of the Discovery or Stimulus phase of someone else’s search for lodging property. That makes it imperative that the experience be a positive one.

WIHP has provided a video infographic to illustrate these points clearly and concisely. The YouTube version is below.

In upcoming articles we’ll be looking at the ways we can reach the prospective guest in each of the decision-making phases of the booking process.

In recent weeks others in the travel and tourism industry have been highly critical of review site TripAdvisor for various shortcomings in its administration of its online lodging reviews (and other reviews, as well). The concerns expressed are world-wide, not simply the complaints of a few, in a small part of the world.

This post is an attempt to gather and synthesize the concerns, to try to identify the core problem, and to suggest improvement.

Recent Complaints About TripAdvisor

In the United Kingdom, Paul White’s Bed And Breakfast Club blog has taken TripAdvisor to task for allegedly fake reviews that have been maliciously posted to damage a property.  Paul suggests that TripAdvisor could have listed hotels give a code to their guests, that could be entered to validate the authenticity of the review.

More recently, Heather Turner, in her Chef Forfeng’s Blog, has questioned mysteriously disappearing reviews that were favorable to a property, vanishing from TripAdvisor. In addition on several innkeeping forums, such as the members-only forum for the Professional Association of Innkeepers International (PAII), or the public Innspiring.com forum, innkeeper problems with TripAdvisor frequently surface. We have documented some of them here on AboutTheInn, as well, calling for greater responsibility from TripAdvisor, among others.

Avoiding Responsibility

Unfortunately, TripAdvisor’s responses to nearly all of these concerns, whether made via blogs and forums, as mentioned above, TripAdvisor’s own Owner’s Forum, or efforts to make direct contact by phone or email, all seem to result in one of two standard responses. The first is utter silence – leaving the innkeeper with the clear impressions that (a) there is no procedure to handle problems innkeepers may have with the review process, and (b) TripAdvisor really doesn’t care if the reviews are genuine or not. The second “response” is the provide boilerplate statements to the effect that reviews are “validated” by a secret process and decisions to post them or remove them are also a secret process, and no further information will be provided. Clearly, the second “response” is no better than the first – no response at all.

Sometimes, in defense of TripAdvisor’s intractable refusal to validate reviews or to explain why valid reviews are removed, statements are made to the effect that TripAdvisor is actually a very small company and incapable of reading every review. Yet, in Paul White’s article linked above, he refers to TripAdvisor’s claims that human beings read every review. Clearly both statements cannot be accurate.

Making Matters Worse

To add financial insult to the unresponsive injury, TripAdvisor has begun (in 2010) offering a “business listing” to properties, with a sliding scale of very high rates, based on size of property. For this payment, the property gets a “nofollow” link from the property’s listing page on TripAdvisor to the property web site. A nofollow link is one that does not pass any search engine credibility with it. You might think that paying for a business listing would give the property owner the ability to communicate with TripAdvisor and to expect some measure of responsiveness. For the most part, you would be wrong.

On the positive side, TripAdvisor does seem to allow business listing customers to communicate with it. However, the responses they receive do not differ significantly from those given to non-business listings.

No Control Over Management of Listings

In fact, an even bigger problem is the way TripAdvisor allows for “management” of a listing by a business. First of all, a property has no choice whether it appears on TripAdvisor or not. They list properties they find, and that people review. You can only remove your “listing” if the property is out of business. You can sign up for a free account to manage a “listing” (allowing for uploading photos and videos, changing some of the details about the property, etc.). You then have limited ability to edit the listing, and can post management responses to reviews. However, if someone else signs up for a free account, claiming to be authorized to manage the listing, they, too, will be able to make changes. It appears that no attempt is made to verify that the person seeking a management account is authorized by the property.

How does this change when the property purchases a business listing? From all appearances, it does not change at all! Someone else can still claim to be authorized to make changes, apparently without TripAdvisor verifying their authority.

Declining to Correct Errors

What happens if information is incorrect, or worse, maliciously false? For the most part, nothing. TripAdvisor simply hides behind American laws protecting site operators from liability for information posted by others. In fact, even when the false information is posted by TripAdvisor, via its parent, Expedia.com (such as incorrect room rates), it claims it is free from any responsibility for the error, as it was posted by someone else.

The Core Problem

The common theme in all these areas is TripAdvisor’s desire to bury its figurative head in the sand, pretending that it has done no wrong and therefore bears no responsibility for the perceived problems. They avoid responsibility for false reviews by taking the position that they are not responsible for content posted by others, or that the reviews meet the TripAdvisor guidelines (even though they are demonstrably false, or that the guest did not stay at the property).They duck responsibility for missing reviews by saying the reviews were removed for reasons that are kept secret. They claim they are not responsible for errors, as the information is posted by others.

The one message that comes through loudly and clearly from TripAdvisor is, “It is not our fault.”

The small properties, whose continued livelihood depends on favorable reviews on sites like TripAdvisor, are the ones harmed by this attitude. But TripAdvisor’s own reputation suffers, as more and more properties who have been harmed find their voices and speak up.

Some Suggestions for Improvement

Yet the solution would seem to be relatively simple (technical issues may be present, but are surely not insurmountable). Take responsibility. Make the effort. Here are some concrete suggestions:

1. Provide for a system of verified reviewers. PAII’s CEO, Jay Karen, has been suggesting for over a year that TripAdvisor find a way to allow for reviewers to be verified, so that a review by a verified reviewer would carry more weight than an unverified reviewer. Other sites do this. Why not TripAdvisor?
2. If you’re going to accept paid listings, then act like a responsible directory. Give a proper account to the business, so they can manage the listing and limit who can make changes to those who are authorized.
3. Listen to the property owners (or authorized representatives). When they say a guest didn’t stay with them, pull the review until it is verified. If they tell you the information provided by a reviewer or relating to pricing, etc., is wrong, take responsibility to make it right. If you don’t trust the owners, then put a footnote with the information saying, “Provided by the property owner.”
4. Listen even more closely to the properties that are paying for a business listing. They are paying for, and should be entitled to, a right to be treated as paying customers. At least give them a fair shake. Explain why a review is removed. If the owner disputes it, then give them a way to prove its validity to you.

TripAdvisor, we know the guests find the information useful. We just want to make it more reliable. And, if we’re paying for the privilege, then we also want you to respect us as paying customers, instead of as if we were dangerous thieves, trying to steal bookings from unsuspecting guests.

At this juncture, we give TripAdvisor only 1 of 5 stars for responsibility.

The ball is in your court, TripAdvisor. Are you willing to take any responsibility?

UPDATE August 25, 2010:

Earlier today TripAdvisor posted the following on the PAII forum:

We identified a bug that resulted in some of our members’ reviews being removed from the site. While this affected only a small fraction of our community and properties on the site, we value every review and opinion and expect to have these posts republished as soon as possible. We apologize for the inconvenience to our community and the property owners, and appreciate your understanding.

Certainly we’re glad to hear that a bug was found and it was corrected. No question about that. Also good to hear that it only affected a small fraction of the TA “community.”

But this creates a new problem: If it was a bug, that means it was a problem caused by TA and its technical people. Somehow that doesn’t quite square with the responses they had given, saying removing a few reviews wasn’t a big problem and claiming they were removed in accordance with TA’s policies. In other words, TA, were you just giving pat answers before and ignoring the facts, or is that what you’re doing now to try to salvage your reputation?

Besides that, it is nice to know it  “affected only a small fraction” of those on TA, but how many is that? Or are there other reviews that have been removed for other reasons?

Does this fix that problem? I suppose time will tell.

Not so many years ago, as the use of the internet technologies was maturing, there was a lot of talk about the leveling of the playing field, allowing the smaller businesses to compete with the larger. You don’t hear so much about that, these days. As businesses of all sizes have turned to internet marketing and social media to build relationships with customers and potential customers, the scales have reverted to the same imbalance as in traditional marketing. Big business as well as small have devoted significant effort to using these technologies, and to finding their way to the top of the search results, especially on Google.

If you’ll indulge me a bit, this scenario seems a little familiar…

For Americans of — ahem — a certain age, there was a science-fiction television series in the late 1960′s that was very popular with teenage boys, called Land of the Giants. I was a few years too old to be interested, but my younger brother was hooked on it. The show involves a group of travelers, marooned on an Earth-like planet, where the inhabitants resemble humans but are 12 times larger than the cast of heroes. Each episode involves the group seeking a way to return to Earth, while avoiding the dangerous giants. Though the giants cause problems, there is always a happy ending, except that the crew never escape.

How does that science-fiction program relate to marketing lodging properties? Or, to borrow from a television commercial, what can a 1960′s sci-fi program teach us about internet technologies? Read on…

The Land of the Giants

For the purpose of this article, the giants are not those who compete directly against us, but those who are ostensibly here to help us. There are a number of these giants. We could consider Google, of course, Microsoft’s Bing, and surely others could be added. In the travel and tourism area we could consider the likes of Expedia, TripAdvisor, and other online travel agencies (OTA’s), as well as some of the larger directories of lodging properties. You get the idea, I’m sure.

All these “giants” (I know, some are much larger than others, but to a small B&B or similar property, all of them are giants) are in business to make money for themselves and for their shareholders. That is perfectly appropriate, and as it should be. However, there is an ethical side to being a giant that some (perhaps most) of these companies seem unwilling to consider.

The Responsibilities of Giants

Nearly all of the “giants” named above have a dual purpose: (1) helping the consumer to find, or to make informed decisions about, or to book, among other things, lodging properties; and (2) helping the lodging properties to be found by interested consumers, or to provide the relevant property information to interested consumers, or to provide booking information to the consumer.

In most areas of business, the decision to provide assistance to others while seeking to make a profit for yourself, carries with it a responsibility to provide that assistance fairly and truthfully, or bear the consequences (legal consequences, civil or even, in some cases, criminal). In other words, you make money offering a useful service, that is good. If you fail to deliver as promised, or if you spread false or inaccurate information, you are responsible for any damage your error causes. To go a step further, if you didn’t know the information was false, you are not usually responsible so long as you correct or retract it when the error is brought to your attention.

Not so for our giants. They seem to do as they please, letting the chips fall where they may, and always hiding behind 5000-7500 words of legal mumbo-jumbo, the essence of which is as if to say, “We’re not responsible for any errors – ours or otherwise” and “By using our site you have agreed to this ridiculous proposition.” If that isn’t enough, they also hide behind legal protections designed to keep a web site provider from being liable for content posted by someone else. However, they use it to shield themselves from ever verifying information, so they can claim they are not responsible for errors, and do not ever need to correct their errors – even when the errors are brought to their attention.

Please understand that we are not saying that the actions of the giants are contrary to the law. We are saying that they are using the law to avoid their moral or ethical obligations to treat their customers fairly and honestly.

Let’s Get Down to Cases

TripAdvisor claims to provide “real hotel reviews you can trust” and “candid reviews.” Most small lodging properties are aware that guests often use TripAdvisor to evaluate their choice of lodging. Consequently, any review, whether positive or negative, can make a big difference to the property.

Mark Stephens, of Brewster Inn in Dexter, Maine describes dealing with TripAdvisor “like going to the dentist, you don’t want to go, but you know you have to.” Like many small lodging properties, the Brewster Inn decided to try TripAdvisor’s new (in 2010) paid business listings, providing a way for the guest to read the TripAdvisor review, and click on a link directly to the property (no such link is provided for properties who do not pay for a business listing).

Brewster Inn’s problems with TripAdvisor fall into two categories. The first is that they have several positive (5 stars, on TripAdvisor) reviews which have vanished. TripAdvisor not only gives no explanation, they respond to inquiries saying that properties who have paid for a business listing do not get any different treatment than free listings. They claim to be unable to disclose the information about why the listing disappeared.

Meanwhile the guest who posted the review was told that TripAdvisor’s automated filters had identified the review as requiring “special attention.” No explanation is given, and although this guest has taken time to reply and verify that it is a real review (it is doubtful that most guests would bother), it appears that TripAdvisor’s efforts “to ensure that the information on our site is unbiased and pure” will prevent this review from being re-published.

The second problem Brewster Inn has found is that a review was published from a guest who never stayed with them. In fact it appears that the review even states that they did not stay (the review is in German, according to an online translation, this appears to be accurate). Stephens posted a management response saying the guest did not stay, and challenged the review. TripAdvisor initially removed the review, but it has reappeared. They have not removed it, despite requests, as the guest refuses to allow it to be removed.

That doesn’t sound very much like “reviews … you can trust.”

The attitude is somewhat different with Google Place Page problems. Instead of simply refusing to correct the errors, Google provides very limited ways to get in touch with them, and then seems to make changes without any regard to the business owner’s corrections.

Business in Freeport, Maine is very seasonal, with bed and breakfasts dependent on the July-October traffic for a significant majority of the year’s revenue, and guests often choose their lodging on its proximity to the primary attraction in the area. In the spring of each of the past three years Google’s Maps (on which the location information on Google’s Place Pages – formerly Google’s Local Business Center – is based) has altered the map location for Brewster House Bed & Breakfast (not the same property – the Brewster family is related to the Brewster Inn’s family, the current owners are not related).

Initially, Brewster House claimed its Place Page, and corrected its map location, which was about a block away from the correct location. A few months later (in the spring, just as potential visitors were beginning to plan summer travel) Google removed the listing entirely, without explanation. Reconsideration was requested, and the listing eventually reappeared. A few months later (in the spring), the listing suddenly was located about two miles away from the actual location, to the southeast. Efforts to correct the location were unsuccessful. Eventually, because Google Maps gets at least its USA data from TeleAtlas, this location was corrected with TeleAtlas, and the business returned to its correct location. This year, again in the spring, the location appeared in yet another incorrect location, about two miles to the south of the correct location.

Each year this incorrect map location has caused untold damage in loss of guests, who were given the wrong location information by Google. Even though Google, as part of its Place Page procedure, verifies that the person claiming the listing is an official representative of the business, they freely change its location to a location not selected by the business!

Ironically, an early corporate slogan of Google was “Do no harm.” It is not difficult to see why they have abandoned it.

These are just two examples. We could also include examples of TripAdvisor, supposedly relying on incorrect information from its parent company, Expedia, to publish incorrect rates for properties, even after they were notified of the error, or examples of directories trying to solict bookings through their own booking gateway, to the detriment of the small property who is the paying customer of the directory, and there are, sadly, many others.

Taming the Giants

Just as there is little doubt that the laws the giants are relying on to shield themselves from legal responsibility for providing erroneous information (the provisions of the US Communications Decency Act) were never intended to protect this type of behavior by the giants, there is little chance that they giants will change their behavior unless given an incentive to change.

Other than changing the law, what are the “little people” to do? Since the problem is the giants, using force (legal proceedings, pleading with them, etc.) is not likely to be effective. However, if those who are struggling with the problems caused by irresponsible or unethical behavior of the giants speak up, and share the information with the public, perhaps the groundswell will create a chorus loud enough to shame them into a more proper behavior.

Are You Fighting the Giants?

Tell us about your struggle in the comments below, and keep up the good fight!

Amid all the frenzy of keeping up with Twitter and Facebook and now Foursquare and YouTube and Blogging and sorting out which directories to list on, and responding to the never-ending flow of emails from directories telling you to hurry and post your latest specials for this month, your latest photos, your latest hot deals, your best recipes and oh, yes, did you remember that you actually have a business to run? sometimes it is nice to … just … take … a … step … back, take a deep breath, and remember what it is we’re trying to do here.

Now, that’s better.

What we try to do

All the different things we’re called upon to do, and sometimes we think we’re required to keep up on, can get so fragmented, that they can pull us in too many directions and keep us from our real job. Recently there was a thread on a B&B forum (I’ve seen the same series of questions and comments on several different forums – the topic pops up every now and then) asking, quite appropriately, how to decide which (pay) directories to list on. The discussion evolved into a discussion of the value of directory links for search engine ranking. Innkeepers must be experts in search engine optimization (SEO) and in statistical analysis of directory listing results, you see.

Meanwhile, every so often there is another blog post about measuring return on investment (ROI) from social media (meaning Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, etc.). Some say it is worthless. Others find value in social media. Innkeepers must be experts in determining ROI in the newest, cutting edge media, too.

And, of course, all innkeepers must be great copywriters so they can blog regularly, post to their Facebook page, and also keep the website up-to-date, post tweets on Twitter, check-in on Foursquare, and, between breakfast, cleaning, shopping and check-ins, run off a couple of quick inn videos and post them to YouTube.

But there’s a secret. We tend to think that everyone else is doing all of these things successfully, so we must do them, too. The secret is, they’re not. Most are only doing a few of these things, if any. Most are not doing them all that well. A few are doing several of them. Even fewer do them really well.

Gaining perspective

Don’t misunderstand: All these things that we busy ourselves about – social media, blogging, seeking the best bang for the buck on directories, etc. – are good things. What we sometimes lose sight of is that they are part of a much bigger picture.

Perhaps as a result of the sheer volume of new information, and the detailed information we must master, we have turned to “experts” to tell us what we need to know. The result is that we have a lot of detailed information on relatively narrow subjects. Only rarely, however, do we put these subjects together into a larger picture.

I will admit at the outset that I am not a trained marketing expert. Consequently, I may not use “correct” marketing-speak. I may miss some things the trained marketer may know. Mea culpa. However, both for our Freeport Maine Bed & Breakfast, and for our other businesses and elsewhere, marketing has been a significant part of my experience.

Much as I dislike the term “heads in beds”, that is the bottom line for most small lodging properties. Some are thrilled to have any guests, any time. Others seek to attract a particular segment of the traveling pubic. But at the end of the day we all need to count the revenue from those guests to pay the bills.

Re-thinking marketing

The level of detail provided by the “experts” (some are truly experts in their area; others are most definitely not), seduces us into a “bottom-up” approach to marketing. We examine each individual directory, social media site, etc., and try to see if it is worthwhile.

If we step back from this a bit, we’ll see that what we are really doing with that approach is letting each of these small contributions create our overall marketing plan, with no real objectives or strategy. It becomes an ad hoc plan.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to start at the top, and see how all these things can work together to accomplish your objectives?

Starting at the Top

1. Setting Objectives

Begin by defining your objectives. It is fine to have big, general objectives (I want to make a profit), but the more specific you can be, the easier it will be to measure your progress. For most small properties, it will be selling a certain number of rooms in a year (or month, etc.), or increasing revenue (or profit) by a certain amount.

Whatever you may set as your objectives, translate them into both money and bookings, so that, based on your average booking value, you know how many bookings you need, as well as how much money you need, to achieve your goal.

Set narrower objectives, too. More visitors to the web site/blog/Facebook page (how many more?). Longer average visits to the web site (how much longer?). You get the idea.

2. Create a Strategy to Accomplish Your Objectives

All the things we started out mentioning (directories, blogs, social media, video, your web site) plus the more obvious, paid advertising, are your tools to accomplish these goals.

If blogging once a week brings you X bookings per year, and blogging twice a week brings you 30% more, will that help you reach your goals? If so, then you should be blogging twice a week.

Similarly, if adding a new directory can add 3% to your annual bookings, and you think that is worthwhile, then you should add that directory. How do you know if a directory will add 3%? That isn’t easy to determine, and results will differ by directory, by your geographic region, and, in some cases, by the membership level you purchase on the directory. Our article on evaluating directories covers many of the considerations. Be wary of claims by the directories that they can produce a certain number of bookings. While these may be based on their click-through rates, they are, at best, averages and, at worst, an effort to sell you something. Higher levels may help, but there will be no guarantees.

What about Facebook, Twitter, etc.? Most of the debate centers around the difficulty in attributing booking results to social media. In this internet age, we are accustomed to relating clicks on our web links with bookings to determine the source of a booking. Social media isn’t that straightforward. It usually requires more time and attention than a simple web page or website, and bookings don’t always come with technical data to show they originated with Twitter or Facebook.

In addition, as with directories the value may lie in more than just matching bookings to the source. Directories can provide value through their reviews, or through publicity they generate for you, despite never sending you a booking directly. Social media is relationship building. If you make friends through social media, and the friend refers another friend, you may have bookings you will never be able to identify as coming from social media, yet the investment of time has paid off.

As mentioned at the outset, discussions of directories (and other potential referral sources) often leads to a discussion of placement in organic search results. However, this is really combining apples and oranges. Listing on directories should be viewed as having value (or not) on their own merit, not whether they help your site place well in organic search results.

Why would we say that? Google’s official view is that paid listings (like paid listings on directories) do not enhance the reputation of your site. We have seen exceptions – most likely where Google has not discovered that the listing is a paid listing – but generally paid directory listings do not help you place well in general search results. It does appear that they can be of some help in local search results, however, so don’t dismiss directories as not helping at all with search placement.

One of the best summaries of the factors that help your site place well in search is Google’s own SEO Starter Guide (pdf).

3. Measure Your Accomplishments

Use a tool to help measure your results. A web-based statistics program such as Google Analytics will help you see where the visits to your web site are coming from, how long the average visitor stays, how many pages they view, etc. If you configure ecommerce tracking you may also be able to track some of the revenue to the source (this is very difficult to configure correctly using online booking systems, but can be done). Other systems, such as Intell-A-Keeper make no effort to trace web site visits, themselves, but track booking sources.

No online tool is perfect. At the very least, it is very tricky to track bookings attributable to social media. Even Intell-A-Keeper can not track a booking source if the guest last visited the referral source too long ago for their computer to have retained the information.

Consequently, you’ll need to create your own record of the things you are trying to measure, and how they are working.

Getting Started

Most likely you’ve already begun using some (or even all) of the tools mentioned. If so, you only need to set your objectives and begin measuring the results. If you need to adjust your use of the tools, to better meet your objectives, or to aid in measurement, what are you waiting for? Do it!

If you haven’t begun using the various tools, or some of them, don’t just dive in! Set up your objectives, and think carefully about how each tool fits those objectives. Decide which social media tools are right for you. Decide which directories are likely to pay off (considering all the different areas of value they may bring), and be sure you are signed up for only those who will help you reach your goals.

If you don’t have the background or the skills to do some or even all of these things, don’t despair! There are a number of bed & breakfast-centered companies (several of whom are mentioned above) who can provide help with some, or all, of these services. Others, including PAII, provide training in using these tools, to help you learn to do it yourself.

Most important of all, however, is measuring the results so that you know when you’ve accomplished your objectives!

A few months ago we wrote about the importance of tracking the sources of reservations, and mentioned that we would be testing the Intell-A-Keeper software available from Acorn Internet Services. While the high season bookings will get busier in the coming weeks, we thought it was time for an update on that process.

Our Prior Tracking Method

Before using IAK we would track our reservations by asking guests (via an online form for online bookings, or directly if over the phone) where they had located Brewster House Bed & Breakfast. We tracked those results in a spreadsheet each year, so we could compare year-over-year changes. We also used Google Analytics to determine hits on our website, and the sources of the traffic, and configured Goals so we could attempt to track the source of bookings.

In general, we knew that guest responses were not reliable, but without a better tracking mechanism, were not able to determine which were valid. Using Google Analytics only partially helped in this regard, as we could get a booking, then not be able to determine how the guest came to our site. This is largely because Google Analytics tracks only the last referer (yes, the correct spelling is misspelled – go figure) – the last source before coming to our site.

To attempt to do better, we talked with Acorn and installed Intell-A-Keeper.

Setting up Intell-A-Keeper

Set up is not difficult. You must have access to your web pages via an FTP account (unless you host your site with Acorn), and they will also need access to your Pay Per Click accounts, if you have any. For anything else you want to track, such as your online booking system (of course!) and any online directories to which you subscribe, Acorn will need login information so they can update the link to your website, and, in the case of your booking system, they will add some tracking code so that bookings and their sources will be properly tracked.

Once the setup is completed, bookings will be tracked in the IAK system (in addition to anything else you may be using).

What happens when you get a booking

After IAK is installed, when you get an online booking you receive an email from Acorn, showing the various places the guest visited in searching for your property. Often the results will show that they visited several sites – from search engines to directories – before booking with you. This is one of the great strengths of IAK – you know more than just the last place they visited before booking with you.

What about bookings over the telephone? There is a clever solution to that problem, and one that usually results in good information to verify (or correct) the information provided by the guest. When you take a booking over the telephone, if you send an email confirmation, you put a link in the email to a special page on your website, asking the guest to click the link to confirm their receipt of the confirmation. When they click the link, the same browsing information is transmitted as when they book online, and the property receives an email detailing the guest’s searches before the booking.

Analyzing the information

Because most guests visit several sites before committing to a booking, IAK gives a portion of the credit to each site that led to the booking. This usually results in a much better understanding of which referral sources are actually sending guests your way.

After signing up for IAK, you have a login to a reporting page at intellakeeper.com, where you can select reports on referrals, search terms, entry pages, reservation types (email confirmation, online booking or website confirmation button), history (bookings by date and time), unknown visitors and query strings (the queries used to locate your property and book – including your own tracking query strings).

The Referrals report (left) shows the referring sites, the number of bookings the site participated in sending, and the percent of the total bookings that represents. You can drill down to see the search terms used from that site, the entry page to your site, and other details from that site.

You’ll notice that the bookings are fractions, such as google.com being responsible for 16.68 bookings. This means that, to some degree, google.com participated in 16.68 bookings, but it was not the sole referer in all of them (or else there would be no fractional amount).

The History report also allows you to obtain the details of an individual booking. This is, in a slightly easier-to-read format, the same information that comes in the email after a booking.

Comparing the IAK results to Google Analytics in determining the source of bookings hardly seems fair. With Google Analytics, if you examine the reports shortly after a booking, and if your Goals are properly configured and your online booking system is configured to properly report on bookings, you may be able to determine the source of the booking. If many bookings have occurred, or much time has elapsed, finding only the last source to refer the visitor is an educated guess, at best. IAK not only shows several sources (we have seen as many as 23 referral sources, but the average seems to be between 2 and 5 sources), but you can verify a specific source for an individual booking.

IAK isn’t always able to identify all possible sources, but it is far more accurate than either guest information or Google Analytics. One area where IAK can not provide accurate information are where the booking occurs more than 30 days after the search for lodging. In that case the “cookie” file that IAK relies upon may have expired and been deleted, so any sources prior to that time will not be recorded. Another problem occurs when the guest calls to book, but confirms the reservation by clicking on the email link from a different computer (such as a work computer), so that the cookie information simply isn’t present. Even with these limitations, the ability, in the significant majority of cases, to supply detailed information on multiple referral sources makes it a very valuable tool, indeed.

Final thoughts

One thing we want to make very clear is that we are not suggesting dropping Google Analytics for IAK. Google Analytics provides a huge amount of valuable information. However, it is not really adequate for determining the sources of bookings. Neither its Goals nor its e-commerce settings adequately give credit to the various sources of a booking. IAK beats it in that department, hands down.

In order to accurately determine ROI for your referral sources (such as directories, etc.), you must be able to pinpoint where your bookings come from. While IAK isn’t perfect, it provides great detail on the sources of bookings, and arms the innkeeper to make a much better decision than relying on guest information or Google Analytics for booking source information.