Hoteliers take note: If you haven’t renewed your TripAdvisor Business Listing lately hold on to your hats, rates have gone up and in most cases substantially " like double what was paid last year.
Caribbean Marketplace is taking place in Puerto Rico this week. Several years ago, at Marketplace, the TripAdvisor Business Listing was introduced. Since many hoteliers signed up at that time they are being asked, or will soon be asked to renew with sizable increases in fee.
Hopefully there is money in your budget to cover the increase. The consequences for not renewing are substantial. In addition to going a year without direct links to your website, reservations email and phone number, the price of a “new” listing is significantly higher than the increased rate for renewal would be.
Why are rates going up so much? Most likely because TripAdvisor now knows how valuable they are to hotels.
TripAdvisor is now the world’s largest travel community with over 260 million monthly visitors. That comes to over 3.1 trillion visitors annually.
They are now estimating the total revenue their Business Listings are sending to each hotel. This is based on “extensive data, including total page views and clicks for your Business Listing, average daily rates and length of stay, click through rates for similar properties and estimates of conversion rates per industry standards.”
You’ve probably recently received an annual report for your hotel. It looks like this:
Here is what you should do:
- Go to Google Analytics and find out how many clicks your hotel has received from TripAdvisor over the past year.
- Ask TripAdvisor how many people clicked through to your website. We did and found that their traffic estimates were significantly higher than what we tracked through Google Analytics.
- Calculate the cost per click (CPC) from your TripAdvisor Business Listing. Divide the cost for your renewal by the number of clicks you received from TripAdvisor.
- Compare your CPC to the performance you get through PPC. It is possible that the CPC from your Pay-per-click campaign is lower than what you get through TripAdvisor. That said, you do have to estimate the value of a visitor coming through TripAdvisor versus a regular PPC campaign. If you’re a small luxury hotel with great reviews there’s a good chance the
- TripAdvisor visitor will be much more valuable than one from your regular PPC campaign.
The Bottom Line
If you’re like most hoteliers you may get sticker shock when you see how much more your TripAdvisor Business Listing renewal is this year versus last. But get over it and do the math and figure out how much value you get out of TripAdvisor.
And when you do, you’ll no doubt conclude that having a TripAdvisor Business Listing is worth the cost. So find the money somewhere in your budget and make sure you pay before the expiration date. You definitely do not want to pay the reactivation price.
If you have received your TripAdvisor renewal lately what have you done? Share your thoughts with fellow hoteliers. Post a comment.
www.madiganpratt.com
