Consistently collecting reviews is a necessary and important part of performing well on SafariBookings. Our platform-wide booking data shows that receiving quote requests – and converting them into bookings – is much easier for tour operators who have recent reviews. This article will explain how to best gather new reviews on SafariBookings.
Reviews on SafariBookings: how do they work?
Reviews are shown on an operator’s tour page under ‘Reviews’ and offer a rating out of 5 stars. They also offer an opportunity for people to leave comments about specific tours. Reviews have the biggest impact on your rankings. We advise operators to use our invite service and publish the reviews and review widgets on their website; more information on that later in this article.
Reviews are also a very important factor that clients take into consideration. Having sufficient and recent reviews will help you get more quote requests. It will also help to convert these requests into bookings.
A ranking bonus is given to your company profile depending on your reviews.
You’ll get the maximum ranking bonus for reviews if:
- You have at least 25 reviews
- You have an average rating of at least 4 stars
- Your most recent review is less than six weeks old
If your last review was published several months ago, clients may think your business is not doing well. Therefore, it is recommended that you try to get a constant stream of new reviews by sending review invites every week or two.
Please note that all reviews are checked by our review checking team for legitimacy. First automatically, then sometimes also manually. This process can take up to one week, so please be patient when waiting for reviews to be added to your company profile.
Use our invite service and get more reviews
Make it a standard procedure to invite all clients who booked through SafariBookings to write a review. Not only do reviews generate more inquiries, they help to convince people to book with you. Reviews are vital for safari operators and travel in general. You are allowed to invite former clients as well as potential future clients.
You can use our invite service (found here) to invite your clients to write a review about your company on SafariBookings. You can schedule invites or send them directly: just enter the names and email addresses of your clients and we’ll take care of the rest. We will automatically send a personalized invite and a reminder after three weeks. On average, 25% of the people invited using our invite service write a review, which is an excellent result. The invite service is available in Tour Operator Admin (under ‘Review Services’ in the left-side panel).
You can also invite clients by sending them a personal email. Make sure you add your review page link in this email.
If you have reviews from past clients on TripAdvisor, you can also ask those clients to write those reviews on SafariBookings. To make it easy, copy their review in an email so they can copy and paste it on SafariBookings. Make sure you include your personal SafariBookings review link. More information can be found on this page.
Boost your web sales with our widget and reviews
We have two tools to help you add your approved SafariBookings reviews to your website. Reviews approved by SafariBookings are more credible than reviews that are published and written by you.
Operators have estimated that their direct web sales increased by 10% to 25% after they implemented our review tools. See a live example here.
Rating widget
The rating widget enables you to show the average rating of your SafariBookings reviews on your website. It can be used on pages where you can’t add full reviews. Doing so will help convince potential clients to choose you, and thus, boost your web sales. The widget contains our logo to show that SafariBookings is the source of the reviews. This adds credibility since the reviews come from an independent third party and are not controlled by you. We recommend adding the rating widget to the important pages of your website, such as your home page and the ‘About Us’ page.
The rating widget is available in four versions:
More information on how to add widgets to your website can be found here.
Add your SafariBookings reviews to your website
People do not rely on online testimonials anymore. Today, people use reviews to help decide where to go, which accommodation to book, and which tour operator to choose. Adding reviews to your website helps convince potential clients to choose you.
We provide a tool that enables you to easily add your SafariBookings reviews to a new ‘Reviews’ page on your website. You can customize the look and feel to match your website’s design. The SafariBookings logo and a disclaimer at the top explain that the reviews are trustworthy, as they are moderated by SafariBookings, not by you.
More information on how to add reviews to your website can be found on this page.
For more information on how to use our review tools, go to the reviews page on the SafariBookings operator admin, or click here.