How to improve your visitor attraction’s TripAdvisor Popularity Ranking
Whether you like it or not, TripAdvisor is a force to be reckoned with when it comes to growing your attraction’s online visibility and visitor confidence.
TripAdvisor is the world’s largest travel platform. As of 2020, there were approximately 884 million reviews on the site. Pre-Covid, average monthly unique visitors stood at 463 million – that’s 463 million people planning and booking their next trip on its pages every month.
It’s a busy and influential marketplace, and your visitor attraction is missing a trick if it doesn’t already engage with it. The higher your attraction ranks on TripAdvisor, the more likely it is that users will spot it when they’re researching their next trip.
What is the TripAdvisor Popularity Ranking?
TripAdvisor’s Popularity Ranking ranks similar businesses within a geographical location against each other. It’s not to be confused with your Bubble Rating, which is your overall score out of five, with one bubble meaning “terrible” and five meaning “excellent”. According to TripAdvisor, 58% of customers say TripAdvisor Bubble Ratings are significant when deciding what attractions to visit, and Bubble Ratings play an important part in deciding Popularity Rankings.
How does TripAdvisor’s Popularity Ranking work?
The Popularity Ranking algorithm is based on three factors:
- The quality of reviews
- The quantity of reviews
- The recency of reviews
Because the Ranking process rates your attraction compared to other similar businesses in the area, your ranking is affected by the performance of nearby attractions as well as your own.
There are steps you can take to improve your performance for each factor and improve your attraction’s Popularity Ranking.
1. Improve the quality of reviews
Quality is based on your overall TripAdvisor Bubble Rating. It comes as no surprise that the best way to edge closer to a five Bubble Rating is to ensure a great experience at every stage of the visitor journey. A few ways you can do this are:
- Manage expectations. Make sure the Acquisition stage of the visitor lifecycle gives visitors realistic expectations of their experience. That means displaying up-to-date photos of and information about your attraction on your website, social media, marketing materials and all pre-visit communications.
- Exceed expectations on arrival. First impressions matter so start the visitor’s on-the-day experience with a warm welcome and hassle-free entry.
- Read your reviews and directly address any legitimate concerns. If reviews consistently mention tired décor, get a paint job. If they repeatedly reference poor customer service, some extra training might be in order. And when you do this, make sure you respond to the reviews to highlight your actions. The same issues shouldn’t come up again and again.
2. Increase the quantity of reviews
Encourage as many visitors as possible to leave reviews. The more good reviews you have, the higher up the ranks you’ll appear – to a point. TripAdvisor is actually looking for a “critical mass” of reviews:
“When we talk about review quantity, it’s important to note that a business just needs to have enough reviews to provide statistical significance and allow for a confident comparison to other businesses. Just having more reviews doesn’t mean that a business will be ranked higher than its competitors.”
In a nutshell, your goal is to receive enough positive reviews to give TripAdvisor (and its users) confidence that your visitor attraction is currently providing a reliably good visitor experience. If your visitor attraction has consistently good reviews, it will rank higher than a nearby competitor with a similar number of mixed reviews.
This largely comes down to your post-visit communications at the Retention stage of the visitor lifecycle. Your automated post-trip emails should include a request for a TripAdvisor review sent just a few days after the visit, while the experience is still fresh. Don’t forget to make reviewing easy by including a link.
You can also have visual reminders at your attraction. Download a TripAdvisor sticker to display on site (stickers are currently suspended due to the pandemic but will be available again) and a TripAdvisor ‘Review us’ logo for your digital and print assets.
By the way, it’s strictly against TripAdvisor’s policy to offer incentives for reviews.
3. Maintain a steady stream of reviews (recency)
More recent reviews carry more weight within the ranking algorithm than older reviews. You need a steady stream of good reviews to improve, or at least maintain, your ranking. So there’s no taking your foot off the gas once you’ve achieved that “critical mass” of reviews!
