The trip advisor review thing is a double edged sword. Some tourism companies are created and flourish totally due to Tripadvisor reviews. I have seen many over the years essentially get boosted to Antigua TripAdvisor stardom when they have all their friends and family review their (about to start) excursion even before the first paid guest is taken. With all these new five star ratings, “real” guests decide to give them a try. If the product is good, then the legit reviews start pouring in and business is booming. Other excursions with extremely low guest capacity have more reviews during their first year than is mathematically possible. For example, a tour that takes 6 guests a day when maxed out gets more reviews than other tour companies that take 250 a day. It’s an interesting situation and people need to use more than just tripadvisor these days when deciding upon a tour. Check how many times a reviewer has posted, and look at their other posts. Then for more info look at the company’s new media accounts. Their Facebook, their Instagram, their blogs, Twitter and their “about us” section in their website tells you plenty about what kinda company they are and what they get up to.
Anyway, the reason for this blog post as the title suggests is that we recently had a very bad trip advisor review from someone. Unlike many tourism companies I rarely reply to tripadvisor reviews. I like to see the reviews come in and have people read them without me commenting on each one. Of course we totally appreciate people taking the time to write reviews about our tours ESPECIALLY as they are overwhelmingly positive. That goes without saying! If you have written one, we thank you. All my crew read them even before I do, and recently some of the team told me about this bad review. The crew were upset and felt that it wasn’t an honest one. They asked me to respond and after thinking about it for a while, I did. I wasn’t sure TripAdvisor would post my management response, so I shared my response on our Facebook page. For whatever reason, Facebook decided to let my response be seen in many of our members newsfeeds. This doesn’t always happen, and that’s why we encourage people to share posts when they can. Anyway, within hours we had dozens of comments and likes. The response was totally unexpected and the love that the Adventure Antigua team got over the next 24 hours was crazy kool and boosted morale like you can’t imagine. Thanks so much to all of you that posted on Facebook and then even went and posted for the first time on TA.
If you are thinking about coming on one of our tours, please have a read of some of the comments on our Facebook post. Click here for that.
In the end, the two star guest review helped our company in so many ways, and although we don’t want anymore bad reviews, this one ended up being very positive for us.