Internal survey: customers become ambassadors - how travel agents and tour operators use reviews
The average rating for travel agents and tour operators is 4.75 stars
Travel agents and tour operators who also actively request customer evaluation receive an average of 50% more feedback on their profile
As many as 23% of customers leave a review
Berlin, March 13, 2018. It's time to start planning your next holiday - where do you want to go? Vacation research statistics show that the played a major part in bookings in 2017: In Germany, for instance, 62% of people researched their holiday destination online. It's no wonder that "The world of e-travel" was a special topic at this year's ITB, the world's leading travel trade show. This brings about the question: How can customers become ambassadors for your company? Rating and review platform ProvenExpert.com has the answer. An internal survey we conducted has shown that travel agents and tour operators that actively use the ProvenExpert tool receive an average of 50% more feedback. 46% of satisfied customers also wrote a review.
Customer satisfaction as advertising
Booking a holiday online has become simple. In 2016, around 26.62 million holidaymakers booked their trips online. But sometimes, the sheer amount of offers online can be overwhelming. When was the last time you planned a trip to an exotic destination? An internal survey conducted by evaluation platform ProvenExpert reveals that specialist travel agents in particular - such as FE-Reisetouristik GmbH, who offer a Rome package that includes an audience with the Pope - know how to use active feedback management to their advantage. With 545 reviews and an average star rating of 4.65 (VERY GOOD), this company is aware that the impression made on a customer is more authentic than any advertising claim. Here's Remo Fyda, CEO of ProvenExpert.com to tell us more. Use the voices of your satisfied customers by asking them to tell you in what way your customer service helped and was of value. Smaller travel agents tend to be a bit too passive in this regard.
How can travel agents and tour operators reach potential customers?
If you want to be noticed offline, you need to have an online presence. According to our referral marketing expert Remo, time and place is not important for potential customers when they are deciding which business they want to spend their time planning with. According to ProvenExpert's internal survey, 5 rating platforms could be filtered out that tour operators have on average included most frequently in their profiles. Passive portals, where everyone can rate, whether they are a customer or not, are used in moderation. Google is used by 30.5%, Facebook 21%. Country-specific portals such golocal (5.2%), cylex (3.2%) and meinungsmeister (2.1%) only feature in the single digits. Around 77% of travel agents and tour operators have a social media account. But how can your customers become brand ambassadors?
Holidaymakers are open to feedback
Request your satisfied customers to leave reviews and show your colleagues and the world just how good a job your team is doing, advises Remo Fyda. This motivates people and it pays off at the same time - on average, travel agencies and tour operators receive more than twice as many ratings on their profile than those that only bundle ratings from different sources. According to our survey, an average of 23% of people who've booked vacations provided feedback. Don't forward to send customers a gentle reminder to rate your business. Every opinion increases your visibility, suggests Remo. Within the travel industry, feedback can fall under various themes, according to the point in time when the customers responds. Was the consultation helpful, the recommendations good, the travel route well-organised? The more feedback you receive, the better positioned you are to speak to the diverse interests of potential customers. If an online reviews speaks to someone who is interested in booking a holiday, you've already reached them. That's exactly how existing customers can bring in new customers.
Actions reap rewards
It's no secret that unhappy customers are more likely to give unprompted feedback. But companies who proactively request customer feedback don't just increase their total number of reviews, but generate an average of 94 percent positive feedback as well. That's 20-30% more than without active support. Also, when you work with a professional referral marketing management solution, both you and potential customers have the full overview of all your feedback. This ensures you have full control of your reputation, and appear transparent for prospective customers. The internal survey indicates an average overall rating of 4.75 stars for travel agents and tour operators. Dissatisfied customers are more likely to leave very short reviews, if they even write a comment - only 1% do so. Respond to critical customers with a targeted solution, or details for how to contact you directly, recommends Remo. This will help take the wind out of their sails. In contrast, 46% of satisfied customers leave reviews - feedback that's visible to potential new customers. Our evaluation expert Remo sums up our tips as follows: Your customers are not only the best form of advertising - they're your most valuable instrument for quality measurement, too.
About ProvenExpert
Together with Remo Fyda as CEO, ProvenExpert.com has become one of the best-known online platforms for qualified customer feedback and review aggregation in the region of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Since 2011, the referral marketing platform offers targeted industry surveys that companies can customize and use in a matter of minutes to start collecting feedback from customers. The surveys provide detailed insight into the needs of customers and their satisfaction levels, as well as helping to uncover new business potential. The resulting feedback can be easily used for online marketing purposes with ProvenExpert's rating seal and profile and combined with customer reviews from over 320 websites like Facebook, Google, and other platforms. More than 34,000 freelancers, entrepreneurs and large companies use ProvenExpert.com's online surveys to collect customer feedback. As of 2017, the ProvenExpert platform is also available in English.
