How to Build a Review Engine Guests Actually Want to Use

90% of travelers read reviews before booking, yet most great trips never turn into a single review. Why? Timing.

In this episode of the Tour Operator Growth Podcast, Nikki and Greg open the Sharing stage of the Resmark Growth Engine and break down how to build a review system guests actually want to use. They dig into the 24 to 72 hour window when guest excitement peaks, how to set up an automated SMS and email review sequence that feels personal, where to send guests to leave reviews, and how responding to every review (especially the critical ones) can turn browsers into bookings.

What you'll learn:

• Why reviews drive SEO, AI search, and OTA rankings, not just social proof
• The 24 to 72 hour window when guests are most likely to leave a review
• How to build an automated, personalized review sequence over SMS and email
• Where to send reviews: Google for direct bookings vs. OTAs like TripAdvisor and Viator
• Why a great response to a 3-star review can convert better than a 5-star one
• How to handle negative reviews, fake or bot reviews, and total silence
• Simple tactics you can implement this week to capture more reviews

If this episode helped, share it with a tour operator who's earning reviews but not capturing them, and subscribe so you don't miss part two.

🚀 Take the Growth Engine Assessment to find out where you might need to improve:
https://www.resmarksystems.com/growth-engine-survey

📲 Follow Us on Social Media
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ResmarkSystems
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/resmarkllc
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@RESMARKSystems
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/resmark-systems

📈 Want Help Growing Your Tour Business?
Visit https://www.resmarkweb.com
Book a call: https://www.resmarkweb.com/request-quote
Call or text us directly: 385-449-4079
Email Nikki: nikki@resmarksystems.com

Chapters:
1:15 The Sharing stage & the 5-stage Growth Engine
2:30 Why reviews matter: 90% of travelers read them
5:43 What's in a guest's head after a trip (the 72-hour window)
8:11 How to capture reviews in the moment
10:57 Building an automated review sequence
15:25 Where to send reviews: Google vs. OTAs
17:48 Why you shouldn't put all your eggs in one basket
19:27 Responding to every review (and the 3-star secret)
24:43 Handling bad, fake & missing reviews
30:51 Top tactics to get more reviews this week
33:04 Recap & what's coming in part two

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi, everybody. We're back with another episode of the Tour Operator Growth Podcast. Before we dive in, if you've been following along and getting value from these episodes, we'd really appreciate it. If you like, subscribe, leave us a review. It helps us grow, helps us reach more tour operators. And honestly, it helps me show my boss that we can keep doing this. And by that, I mean great himself. And if you're getting value from these episodes and don't have time, resources, or the desire to even implement everything yourself, just know that we are always a phone call away. You can book a free consultation anytime, and we're happy to have that conversation about your tour business, about your goals, and where you might be able to improve. So today we are diving into the final stage of the Resmark Growth Engine. But don't worry, just because Greg and I are wrapping up this framework doesn't mean we're running out of things to talk about. We have plenty more topics and conversations ahead as we keep diving in deeper. And if you've been following along from the beginning, you know that there are five stages to the Resmark Growth Engine. We have dreaming, planning, booking, experiencing, and sharing. Now it's great if you've listened to every episode from the beginning, but if you're just tuning in today, that is totally fine too. This episode will make sense on its own. That said, all five stages work together and each one plays an important part in helping tour operators grow. So today we are focusing on the final stage, which is sharing. We're actually going to split this into two separate episodes. The sharing stage is really your reputation engine. It's reviews, referrals, word of mouth, user-generated content. You'll hear us say UGC, that's what that means, and customer advocacy. At its core, it's answering one simple question: how can we turn one customer into 10 raving fans? If you get this stage dialed in, it really is going to become your most profitable marketing channel. So today I want to start by talking about why this stage is so important. So sharing is the one stage where you can let your guests do the marketing for you. Your job is to make sure that they have something to say and a reason to say it. They genuinely love their experience so much that they need, not want, they need to tell their friends and family about it. I want to say this stat and I want you to think about it for a second. 90% of travelers read reviews before booking. The reason I say this is because a couple days ago I was on Facebook. And if you're in any of the tourism Facebook groups, maybe you even saw this, there was a Facebook post and it was pretty much saying, I'm done. It was a tour operator. I'm done asking for reviews. They're bogus, anyways. The people asking for reviews, they are just really trying to pull and get these reviews when people don't want to leave their reviews. And although I understand where he was coming from with that post, I don't think we can't look at it like that. Sure, there are tons of businesses out there that are buying reviews, and that's not right. And there are other businesses that are really focusing on incentivizing people to leave reviews. For example, I've been to several restaurants because they had thousands of five-star reviews on Google. And I'm like, this is the best restaurant ever. I go and I sit at a table, and I'm like, at the end of the dinner, the waiter or waitress comes up to me and says, Can you leave a five-star review? If you do, we'll give you a free dessert. And they stand right over me until I leave that five-star review. But of course I want that free dessert, so I'm gonna do it. Um, and I do think that that does um create some sort of like unauthentic side of Google reviews or reviews in general. But going back to that stat, 90% of travelers are going to read reviews before booking. So not everybody thinks that way. So when you are, when a guest is comparing your tour business with your competitor, and let's say your competitor has 25 reviews and you have 12 reviews, and your competitor and you have similar websites in terms of quality, you guys have are both posting on social media. Most likely that person is going to choose the tour operator with more reviews, no matter how they got them. And similarly, similarly, let's say your competitor has a hundred reviews. Maybe they're four stars, maybe they're five stars. They're they're pretty high though, and you only have 12, but you have a better website, you have better social media strategy, most likely they're still going to go with the tour operator with more reviews. Um, so that is something really important to think about. So before you scratch the importance of reviews, just remember that. I get where you're coming from if you do think that, but they are important. So I want you to focus on them. And also, reviews are not just about social proof, they're about SEO content. They fuel AI search and they help with OTA ranking signals. Okay, so hopefully now you understand the importance of reviews. But throughout this podcast episode, we need to think of this sharing stage as a system. And two things matter in this timing and consistency when we're trying to get feedback, reviews, referrals. You have to ask in the right moment, or the whole thing is just going to fall apart. Greg, let's chat about that from a customer's point of view. What do you think is actually happening in a guest's head in those first few days after they get home? Or maybe it's a day trip and it's just a few hours after their trip has finished.

SPEAKER_01 5:43

If you're like me, which I'm assuming a lot of people are this way as well, you're gonna go through a few different states. So for me, and this is with trips, this is with concerts, this is with like any fun activity that I do, is that day that I get done with the thing. So like I went to a concert just last week, and Friday, all I could think about was like, that was so much fun. But I'm tired. I stayed up late. I need to catch up on some sleep, need to get back into my routine. That's a little bit more for you know, multi-day trips or like a trip where I was gone for multiple days from my house. And so it's kind of like day one. I just want to kind of remember how fun that was basking it, but I'm also gonna kind of ease back into my routine. The next little day two to day six is what I call it, because that's kind of my zone. It's it's often, you know, 24 hour to 72 hour kind of period after the trip is when I have the need to tell everyone about how awesome my trip was. Anyone I see, one, they might know I went on a trip, so they're gonna ask. So like I'm gonna be like, oh my name's so awesome, whether people ask or not. Like, I just got back from here, it was so much fun, you should go do it. I'm gonna laugh with my my wife or my friends, family, whoever I went with, about like all the awesome things that happened, but all the funny things that happened on our trip as well. Um and then after that kind of time period passes, that for me it's two to six days, but maybe it's 72 hours, like trip excitement is starting to fade and I just adjust back to normal life. So if I do not leave a review in that initial 24 hours to 72 hours, two to six days, like I'm never gonna leave a review. Ever. It's it's kind of like that you move into a house, you meet your neighbor, but if you don't learn their name and meet them pretty soon after you move in, you're never gonna talk to them. Or if you talk to them, you're never gonna know their name. It's happened at my old house. We had neighbors for eight years. We did not know their last name for at least four of those years because we didn't hear it the first time they said it, it just got awkward, right? So this funny of what was that?

SPEAKER_00 8:06

I'm that's funny you said that because I'm in that situation. That's my fault.

SPEAKER_01 8:11

Happens all the time. It's just how humans operate. Um we get to an awkward period, right? So with trips, it's more it's maybe not an awkward period, but it's uh I've moved on with life, I still enjoy, I talk about my trip, whatever, but I'm just not gonna take the time to do that. So that window is really important. That twenty-four-seventy-two hours we'll say, is really important to get people to leave a review. How can we do that? Is really dependent upon your company. Um, I think one of the best ways to get those reviews, especially if it was a good trip for everyone. Uh like I wouldn't do this if maybe there was an accident, someone got hurt, right? But it's a good trip. Maybe you're on a bus on the way back, like have your guides talk about leaving a review. If there's Wi-Fi, literally walk around with a QR code, have people scan it to leave a review. Like, don't wait for some email later to tell them to leave a review, do it in person. Um that personal touch is gonna do a lot. So another thing that's beneficial if you have the time and resources for this, is a personal note from the guide or the owner, not just a system email. I've been on some cool trips with some really cool guides, and it would be I'm I've never had it happen, but it'd be pretty cool to have like a note written from someone that I just spent two days with. Being like, Hey Greg, that was a really fun trip. Thanks for coming. I'd love for you to leave me a review, it helps me with my job. Like, of course I'm going to. I had a blast with you, thanks for reminding me, right? Um so a photo from the actual trip embedded into a an a message, like an email, can be beneficial of that trip. So we'll talk about this more, but personalization is key in making it really effective. Um yeah, you can have send out emails with CTAs to go and you know put a review somewhere online. The idea here is you don't want to have too many options or people are gonna struggle to to know where to leave their review. So that's kind of some of the ways that this window, like how we can capitalize on that window. We'll dive in a little bit more deeper on what those paths are in the rest of the podcast. So, Nikki, let's let's start off with how we can set this up. You know, you've got the 72-hour window, the guest is still excited, still in that zone. How do you go about creating an automated review sequence? And how does that actually look from start to finish?

SPEAKER_00 10:57

Yeah, sure. So hopefully your booking system allows you to do this. Now, ResMark definitely does. We can do automated SMS and email, basically asking, you know, for the review. But I want to maybe set the stage of what those messages might look like. So message one, so this is 24 hours after the trip or even beforehand. So it's very much like short, concise. We're just sharing and showing gratitude. Maybe we're not even asking for the review at this point. It's mainly just thank you for adventuring with us. And then the message after that, so 48 hours after or before, we're gonna ask for the review. Keep it really short, personal. We want one call to action going to one platform. And we'll talk about which platform later. But if this is SMS, if we're sending this automated messages via SMS, we want to make sure that there aren't a bunch of links that somebody can click, as Greg mentioned a little bit ago. But the important part of this is SMS open rates are much higher than email open rates. However, people are very weary on the spamminess of text messages, especially when you send a link. The other thing too to mention is if you're sending a link, let's just say it's a Google business profile link. So making um pushing people to leave a review on your Google business profile. We don't want a short link. We don't want an abbreviated link. We want the full business.google, whatever that URL looks like, we want that in there because people are more likely to believe that that's a legitimate URL than some spammy short link that we're using. So keep that in mind as we're going through this. And then we want to follow up a week later, two weeks later, we just want to send a little nudge letting people know, you know, no pressure here, but we'd love, we haven't heard from you. We'd love to hear about your experience in a review. Here's the link. Now, as those text messages are going out, we can continue to send emails. And in those emails, we can add in additional links if we want people to leave a review on TripAdvisor or Viantor. Now, we probably do want to focus on one, but email gives us a little bit more real estate than a text message, for example. And here's some uh little tricks that work in actual messaging. So we want to make sure that we're talking about the specific trip that they went on. Don't put specific like codes or anything like that. We want to make it personal. We want to say their name. We want to say what trip they went on, maybe even the guide they went with, make it personal. All this can be automated. We want to make sure that it is in mobile formatting. So most likely people are looking at the text message, of course, on their phone, but also the email on their phone as well. So make sure it is mobile friendly. And we also want to make sure that anybody who has left a review, we want to take them out of the sequence. Sometimes the easiest thing to do is just to remove anybody who clicked on that link, assuming that they left a review, but we can also add in additional uh conditional logics that say if they did leave a review, take them out. And we want to segment by trip type. So if they were on a multi-day rafting trip, we want to make sure that they get a different message than somebody that maybe did a two-hour kayak. They're not going to be in the same sort of email sequence. But the other thing to note here too is yes, we're automating all of this post-trip. So the moment they finish the trip up into that 72-hour window, peak happiness, right? When they are super happy, but they are also super happy in the middle of the trip. So this is a great opportunity for the guy to mention the review. I'm not saying that the guy needs to say, leave us a review right now, but when your guest is at peak happiness, you can share with them that the one way they can help spread the good news, to spread the, you know, opportunity for other people to experience this amazing, life-changing trip is by leaving us a review. So set the stage from the beginning all the way throughout, and then post-trip, of course. Okay, great. I get this question all the time. And I didn't want to dive too much into it as I was going through some of my points. Um, where should we be sending people to leave a review? Should it be Google, TripAdvisor, Viador, all of them? What's your opinion on that?

SPEAKER_01 15:25

So I think the first thing an operator should ask themselves is where do you want your bookings to come from? Do you want direct bookings? Do you want bookings to come from an OTA or somewhere else? I would start with that question. And if you want more direct bookings, I would focus on Google. Because direct bookings, people are usually coming through Google, Bing, AI, those type of things, right? And so Google is going to be that best place to be visible. You can wrap it around with schema so that it shows up more in AI overviews and other places in that search. But if your company is heavily reliant on OTAs, it's not a bad thing to push people towards leaving them on TripAdvisor. If that's where the bulk of your business is coming from and you're okay with that, definitely get reviews from TripAdvisor. But the downside of you know, all of your reviews going to TripAdvisor when you want direct bookings, is TripAdvisor's most likely gonna rank above you now because they're just generating all the content from everyone in the industry for that keyword. Now they have great reviews, people are gonna go to TripAdvisor, they're gonna book, you're gonna pay your fee, and you're missing out on some money that you're losing out to the OTA. Now, like I said, if that's great business model for you, OTAs are great. If you want more direct bookings though, Google is really gonna drive that and you have a little bit more, you know, control over building that that clout with Google. I'm I'm still convinced that Google loves and ranks better the more of their products you use. So if you're using your Google business profile by getting reviews and you're doing Google ads, you're doing all these Google things, Google's like, ooh, you're spending lots of money and time with us, we're gonna rank you higher. Even if your you know, websites maybe not as good as other people. So that's why when I'm looking at websites, there's often times where I'll go and look at the number one um listed company, and I don't see good H1s, I don't see good website structure, but they're ranked number one. And I'm convinced it's because they're doing other things with Google that maybe the other companies aren't doing as much with.

SPEAKER_00 17:48

Um to caveat that is don't put all your eggs in one basket. So I agree we want to push Google Business Profile probably more than anything else, um, if you want more direct bookings. But we don't want all our eggs in one basket because I've seen before, I mean, uh fortunately hasn't happened to any of our clients, but where your Google Business Profile gets suspended, so all your reviews are down or they get removed or there's something funky happening with Google. So it's nice to have a place where your reviews are also in TripAdvisor or Viator in those other places too.

SPEAKER_01 18:24

Absolutely. And um with that, like people that book on an OTA. I haven't done this in a while now, but I'm pretty sure you get an email from that OTA as well to book to review your trip because like Viator wants the reviews on their website. I'm pretty sure I could be wrong. I should have thought of looking at this before, but I'm pretty sure they get you get a review saying, hey, how was your trip, right? And so naturally you're going to get people leaving reviews on OTAs anyway. Um, so it's really just diversifying, but also making sure you're focusing on where you want your bookings to come from. So, Nikki, with that, we're we're getting people to post reviews, whether on Google, TripAdvisor, other OTAs, whatever. How important is it for operators to read the reviews that are coming in and to respond to those reviews? Often I don't necessarily see people responding to reviews. Is that important? It should they be spending time on that?

SPEAKER_00 19:27

It's funny you said that because right before this podcast, I was looking at some tour operators. Um, I was just looking at ones that actually had a lot of reviews and seeing, comparing who responded versus not. And there are tons of unresponded uh people who haven't responded to reviews, goods and bads. Um, and there's a few companies that respond to every single one. So we're gonna touch on this for a second. So, one response rate is a known signal on Google. So, as Greg kind of mentioned about Google and that little, that little trick there is the more you utilize Google's tools, the better. So we want to be responding to the comments and feedback that we're getting. Future guests also read these responses. Believe it or not, of course. I don't know if you're like me, Greg. Do you do this? I will read through people's reviews. I I specifically look for like the negative reviews and see how they respond to them, which we'll talk about in a second. But I actually read people's reviews. Like I go through all the reviews and probably spend too much time on it. But I know I'm not the only one that does that, especially when I'm making a big decision like booking a multi-day tour or even just a day trip if I'm comparing two operators. It's a bit different if you're just walking in somewhere and it's more of a, you know, quick decision that you're making. And what's really interesting to think about is a great response to a three-star review can actually convert browsers better than a five-star review. And that's because when you take the time to respond to that three-star review, addressing their concerns, actually responding in a way that Google wants to see, you're adding in additional, you know, language about the trip and specific things. Google likes to see that as well, as well as people do too. So you want to aim for a 100% response rate, respond to every review, goods, bad, it's ugly, on every platform and respond quickly. Respond within 48 to 72 hours that that review was received. A quick trick to do this is utilize uh reputation management tools. Now, we at Resmark Web do offer one. Um, few caveats to that though. A lot of times, reputation management tools allow you to enable AI responses. I would not do this. I highly recommend not doing it. We have it where we can enable it, but we do not encourage it for our tour operators. We would much rather you manually respond to those reviews. I don't care if you're utilizing AI to Help you, but do not just let AI blindly respond to those reviews. Okay. We want to have a human touch, actually address any concerns that come up. And if it's a five-star review, great. We could still keep it short, brief, you know, and just banking them for their kind review. But it's really important that you're actually going in and responding to those reviews. But the cool thing about a reputation management tool is we're able to do it all in one place. So we're not having to open up Google, Viador, TripAdvisor, all these other places, Facebook, and respond to the review. We could respond it all in one place. And that's the good thing about a reputation management tool. And then when you're responding to the reviews, I kind of touched on how to respond to a five-star. Just thank them, make it brief, maybe mention the moment in the review that made them really happy. Um, four-star reviews, we want to thank them. Maybe a soft acknowledgement on how they could have done a little bit better. In three-star and below, we want to empathize with them. We we want to offer to take it offline, have them give you a call to address those concerns. Please, please, please don't argue in public. Believe it or not, I see it all the time. I see it like way too often. And I think that's probably what I find entertaining, great. And I could literally just drown in Google reviews because I am seeing how people respond to them. Um, but it will just tarnish your reputation. People read those reviews like me, and they see, wow, they addressed that one-star review with anger, and it just was not kind the way they responded. However, if you do get a one-star review and say what you could have done addressed it, and people might, you know, they don't care about that one-star review. So the other thing too, I'll say is don't worry if you get three stars, two stars. Of course, if it's a pattern and it's consistent, that's a red flag. But if you're, you know, getting the majority of five stars, even four stars are great, and then you're getting three stars once in a while, maybe even you got a one star this year. Do not let that get you down. It happens. It happens to everybody. All right, Greg. So with that, let's talk about those one-star reviews. Let's talk about any reviews below three stars, because we'll deem that as it's it's probably not a great experience for that person. What's the right play when you have that bad review? I know I kind of mentioned we have to respond to it, but what do you do for the bad reviews? Maybe the fake reviews, your competitor gave you a one-star review. That's totally not fair, but it happens. Or they're just dead silence and you're not getting any feedback.

SPEAKER_01 24:43

I don't know if I'm just weird here or if other people can relate to this, but when I see a company that only has five stars, especially if it's like a thousand five-star reviews, I like don't trust it at all. Um maybe because I was part of an Amazon one where I got free stuff for leaving five-star reviews for a while. But if I don't see like bad reviews and I don't see four-star reviews, then it's not, in my opinion, authentic. Because no matter what you do as a company, you're going to have a bad day, you're gonna have someone that's grumpy, you're gonna have someone that's mad that they bought, you know, a wetsuit or whatever, a poncho because and they didn't need it. They bought gear that they didn't need because it was a beautiful day instead of a rainy day. Like that's gonna happen. And so, in my opinion, showing those, I skip over five all five-star reviews. I usually go and look at what's the three-star review, what's the four-star review, and how was the response from the company? Because if there was an issue and you respond well, and I can see it resolve to an extent, like Nikki said, take the drama offline, but doesn't mean you can you can't address their issue in public so that in a way that would help someone reading it understand that, like, hey, we we care about your issue, we're gonna, you know, fix it, we're gonna talk to you about it. That eases my mind of like, okay, well, this person has probably just had a bad time. It's a one-off because I can see all these other great reviews, but the way you respond to it really helped.

SPEAKER_00 26:25

So can I say something to that as well? Actually follow up with them offline. So if you know, because sometimes when they leave you a review, you could see the name or you could see information about who that person was. Call them if you have them in your database. Call them, try to make it right because more than likely, if you get them on the phone call and it's you have that conversation, they become a lot more understanding and will edit that Google review, especially if you ask. So keep that in mind. You could totally do that.

SPEAKER_01 26:54

Yeah, I see that all the time on reviews is like, you know, previously a three-star, now it's a four-star, and they explain why. Like that's cool too, because it shows that hey, there was something done to, you know, help make this person happy. They weren't happy for whatever reason. Now they're a little bit more happy. Um now let's address fake reviews. These happen whether these are bot reviews or just bot reviews. Two different bots, DOT or purchased reviews. Um this is becoming more and more a thing because I can go and create a bot that's gonna just go leave reviews places. And I've seen some funny reviews actually on on things that don't relate at all to what is being sold. And you know those are fake. So with those, report them to the platform um as soon as you can. Don't engage with it, don't answer it, just try to get it removed because it's obviously not gonna help you if it's obviously fake. Or you're gonna say something.

SPEAKER_00 28:00

Yeah, but with that is have low expectations, uh, because there are many times where you have a bad review that you need to dispute and it just never gets disputed. Or you you know you got five 20 bot bot B-O-U-G-H-T uh reviews and Google just won't will not dismiss them. So I don't want you to think just because you are disputing them, they're going to be dismissed, because that's the socky part about gold reviews.

SPEAKER_01 28:31

Yeah, and that's where if it's just a negative review, that's where the importance is to address it. Maybe it is good to address, you know, fake reviews as well in a way that's like, hey, yeah, this is obviously a box, or this is inaccurate, whatever needs to be said there. Um just remember not to engage in back and forth if if something comes up there. So the third there's three kind of pieces here of these different cases. So you're getting negative reviews, you're getting fake reviews. The last one I want to talk about is you're getting no reviews at all. So they're just silent. This is usually a delivery problem with your sequence. So if you've already set up what Nikki talked about earlier, you have a problem with your button not working, so people can't click to the to leave the review, they're not getting the email, they don't trust that the email is coming from you, or you're sending it too late, maybe everyone's already kind of over it. These are easy fixes. If you're just not getting reviews because you're not sending anything out, then start sending things out. It's it's very simple to set up and is an easy fix to just start that process because a company that has 12 reviews versus a company that has a thousand reviews, the company with a thousand reviews is gonna be way more trusted. It's it's crazy what a few stars and a number next to it can do to the brain in how you're gonna trust a company or not. So with that, your worst reviews tell you your operational gaps. So learn from them. Don't just see them and get frustrated, but understand that this is a human that felt frustrated. How can you ensure that that doesn't happen again? What can you change or improve to relieve that in future customers' minds? And then operators who treat reviews as feedback, uh a feedback loop, improve faster, and you're just gonna be that much better than your competition if they're not doing that right. It's a great place to learn, grow, and improve. So, Nikki, what are some of the top tactics that operators can actually implement today or this week once they're looking at this?

SPEAKER_00 30:51

Yeah, I want to close it out with this. So add a favorite moment from your trip prompt at the top of the review request. This is going to drive a better response because people love sharing stories. They love sharing what actually, you know, made it a memorable experience. The other thing is train your guys to mention asking for the review at the end of the trip. As Greg mentioned on the bus, ask for it on your way back. Whether they leave it there, which would be ideal, you know, you're you're sharing the QR code while everybody is still there, or, you know, at least you're prompting it in their head to leave a review later, especially if it comes from the tour guide specifically. I love that personal note idea. I think that's amazing. And then the the customer leaves the tour guide's name in the review, which is really special. Um, include a 30-second video clip from the trip in the request email. So that's something really special to get them reminded of how amazing their their tour was. And pin your best five-star reviews on your website. Put this trust you've earned all into the planning stage. This is how we start tying it all back in together. We want to showcase the amazing testimonials and memories that people have created because of your tour company.

SPEAKER_01 32:10

So Vicky, can I just add one thing real quick? I would also say don't be afraid of asking for a five-star review. I know I just mentioned like if all you have are five-star reviews, I'm not necessarily gonna trust that that's true. But it doesn't mean you can't ask for them, right? Like in a in an organic way. So let's say you're on a bus back from a long trip. The guide's like, hey, this was so fun. Like, it really helps me and my job. If you could leave a five-star review, right? I'm gonna walk around with some QR codes, blah, blah, blah. Like something like that is gonna be impactful because more people are just gonna leave a five-star review. I'm probably still gonna be the one that maybe doesn't just because it's gotta be like a perfect trip, which I have left five-star reviews. It's not that I never do, but I'm I'm not one to just be like five stars all the time. But if you tell me to, more likely to.

SPEAKER_00 33:04

Well, that's the thing, is I think the takeaway from all of this is reviews don't happen on their own. So going back to when you mentioned you, it was like post 72 hours, you had a great trap, you had a great experience, but you didn't leave the review. It's probably because it wasn't in the forefront of your mind. And going back to that Facebook uh post that I saw, sometimes like you're not going to, even if they have the most amazing experience, they're not gonna leave the review unless you're asked. So sometimes you have to engineer this into your process. So just remember the window between trip end and 72 hours later is so valuable. And if you're not showing up in it on purpose, you're just leaving five-star reviews on the table. And bookings come with that, right? All right, everybody, part two is coming up next. So we're gonna go a little bit deeper into this sharing stage. Once the review is in, what do you do with that guest for the next 30, 90 days, and even we'll say 10 years from then? This is where real lifetime value comes into play. Repeat bookings, referrals, merch, UGC, user-generated content, and all of that. Make sure you subscribe so you don't miss next week's episode. And if there's a tour operator in your life who is earning re reviews but not capturing them, go ahead and share this episode with them. Maybe we'll give them some inspiration. We'll see you on next week's episode.