Attract direct bookings through Trust Signals

Boost Direct Bookings with Trust Signals in Vacation Rentals

Watch the replay to learn more. 

Following the new Bookster and Revyoos partnership, you can tune in as Christophe Salmon delves into the art of fostering trust with your guests.

Title: Boost Direct Bookings with Trust Signals in Vacation Rentals
Guest speaker: Christophe Salmon

Agenda:

• Identifying Key Trust Factors in Vacation Rentals
  Not sure what a trust factor is? Christophe will break down the different options and explain why they help.
• Enhancing Conversion Rates through the Impact of Reviews
  How can reviews make a difference? 
• Strategies for Utilising Reviews to Boost Direct Booking
  So now you have your sparkling reviews on your site. What are the techniques to maximise their effect?

Useful links

https://www.revyoos.com/w/why-bad-reviews-could-actually-be-good-for-your-vacation-rental/

Script

Kelly: 

My name is Kelly Odor, and I'm the marketing director for Bookster property management software.  

So, if you are new to Bookster events, first of all, I'd like to say thank you for coming and welcome. Bookster is a property management software company. 

We're based here in Scotland, and we provide tools and techniques and partnerships really to help specifically holiday rental owners and holiday rental managers to manage the kind of time consuming tasks of running a holiday rental business. 

So we focus on three core areas, helping you attract guest bookings, which is one of the reasons we've invited Christophe here today. 

Helping you manage your bookings and helping you manage those, those guest needs, the complications and the questions and so on. And we do that in a couple of different ways. You can use our channel manager with partners such as booking.com and Airbnb. 

We also help you attract direct bookings using web design and booking tools, especially for this industry. And now obviously, we have a partnership with reviews that's gonna help you attract even more direct bookings now too. 

And you can use the property management software, which has a range of tools from collecting payments, damage, deposit, collection, and refunds, all the way to automatic email tools and, and a built in guest area. 

So that's enough about Bookster for today. You know who we are, and we've invited today a special guest, Christophe from Revyoos. 

And we've now just got a new connection, a new partnership with Revyoos, and Christophe's here to talk a little bit about Revyoos, and also to offer advice and guidance on trust signals. 

What's really interesting about Christophe, not only does he come from Revyoos, this business that he's created himself, but he has real life experience as a whole new rental manager and experience of attracting those direct bookings. 

And I'm going to pass it over to Christophe. 

Christophe, could you introduce yourself, give us a little bit of information about your properties, your experience, and how you got started with Revyoos? 

Christophe: 

Yes, absolutely. So first, thanks for the invitation. 

Very, very excited to be there. 

And I will, I also wanted to say congrats to all the property managers that are joining today live, or the one that will see the replay because at the end, most of us started the in vacation rental as a hobby or starting our career in any very different area. 

So at the end, we all are  learning short-term rental, vacation rental, doing, doing building our business and attending this kind of, this kind of event. None of us in our youth went to the rental university, right? 

So it's very important to attend this kind of event to learn a bit more and see what we can implement in our business. 

So, congrats to all of you, and thanks to Bookster for organising this kind of, this kind of event. 

So, talking quickly about myself and my experience in vacation rental. I started as a property owner myself years ago, years ago with just one property, then another, I started to, to manage, properties from families and friends. I did this, as a hobby, for eight years. 

And it's in that I decided to quit my job as a digital marketer to live out of my vacation rental and build my own property management company. 

We now manage 40 units on Costa Blanca in Spain and everything related to trust signals direct bookings is always something I I had in mind when I started my company and, talking about reviews, I discovered that,  what we all call our reviews are absolutely out of our control. 

They're split over so many different OTAs and portals that we already don't have any control over them. 

And I had a very bad experience myself when I switched from property owner to property manager when I lost all my past reviews for some of my properties in one big OTA when they made the migration from one account to, to another. 

This was my moment to discover that our reviews are not, are not ours. 

And I searched for some solutions and the, and the market didn't find anything. 

I could see in the hotel industry, there are several big players, but in our industry, none, no one was here in review aggregation. 

So that's why we decided to go for it. 

And I could see that definitely what was a need in my own business was, was a need for, for many more property managers and talking about direct bookings, yeah, this is really something I have always worked on with several strategies. 

In 2023, we closed the year with 48% direct bookings. 

And every year we try to increase this percentage. 

We don't have an objective to reach 100% direct bookings because on one side, I think it's probably,  very challenging, objective, but also because I, I deeply think having a good distribution over the different OTAs and your own your own direct website is the, is the best way to have this diversification and have bookings coming from from a variety of OTAs, but having also definitely a strong, strong direct booking website. 

And that's what we are going to see today with this presentation focusing exclusively mainly on, on trust trust analysis, generally speaking. 

I've tried to gather all of what is for me trust signals, and we will deep go deeper into details specifically in in where I have my expertise, which is the reviews and and we'll see how you can implement really,  the idea and we talk with that about that with with Kelly was to give you actionable tips that you can really implement into your business, not just general principles. 

You will have general ideas and statistics because it's good to know why it's important to focus on that. 

But then the specific actionable tips that you can implement into your,  into your business. 

Kelly: 

That's amazing. 

So we're not on an anti Airbnb, anti Booking.com route here.

It is about working together as kind of having several routes to market.

Christophe: 

Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean it's not that you have to choose one or the other. It's really work on, on both sides. 

OTAs are amazing and they're like booking machines to generate bookings in the short term. 

But having a real, direct booking strategy. 

This is a more long term strategy and definitely something we have to keep in mind and to focus on every year having it in, in our strategy.  I see one question about the OTA breakdown. 

I mean it'll really depend on the market, because in some markets it's easier to get more direct bookings. 

For example, every destination which has more vacation rental, exclusive vacation rental, which is our case, you can reach this, this percentage of 50% or more. 

Uh, I was at an event last week, about scaling rentals. 

And there was a property manager, managing 90 properties in Marbella in the south of Spain. 

And they had over 80% direct bookings. This is absolutely incredible percentages, and this kind of percentage is really not achievable for, for most of us. 

And for example, if we are talking about the city, city destination, where we are talking more about business trips or small trips or trips that are not recurrent trips, what, I mean, we are not talking about guests that come every year on vacation destination.

It's our case. 

And I know it's a case of many, many property managers. 

We have a returning guest from one year to another. 

So out of this 58%, I don't have the exact split between returning guests and direct bookers that find us directly online, but we do have a good percentage of returning guests that come from, from one year to another. 

So, to answer this question, what's the ideal breakdown? Uh, it really depends on the destination. My recommendation is really to, to work on to, to have always the, the, the book direct in your mind and, and work on your, on your daily booking. 

And every year try to increase uh, several points of direct bookings to attract, to achieve the goal, you can set yourself.

Kelly:

I mean the destination that you were talking about with the properties in Marbella, a lot of those bookings are repeat guests that come year on year on year. 

Yeah. And I think, and I know for, for example, if you have another destination that is a city, but people do tend to come year on year, for example, in Edinburgh, you do have a lot of repeat guests because they're coming for the festival each year, then that is an attractive way to manage, you know, to, to increase your direct bookings by getting those repeat guests to come back each time by going through your own website, but getting new bookings through your own website, it is more difficult. 

Christophe: 

Absolutely. 

And so one, one thing is  to get more bookings, the question is to lead between increasing your traffic and then converting better. Is this traffic talking about converting better?

This is already what we are going to see with this presentation. So if you're okay, Kelly, I'm going to go through the first part of the presentation, which is presenting the different trust, trust factor in our industry.  

Kelly:

Yeah. Just to let you know the results of the poll, I don’t know if you can see it. 

So we had 66% said they don't know what your signals are yet, and a few percent said that they know a bit. So I think you can go into quite some detail here and, and really help people out. 

Christophe:

Excellent, excellent. So this is part of the goals of this presentation. 

So let's, let's start with the top trust indicators,  to get more direct bookings. 

So when we talk about trust indicators, the first thing is we have to make a difference between rational and emotional trust factors. 

Some trust factors are fully rational, others are fully emotional, and others are really a mix of both. And this is what we are going to see in this first part of the presentation. 

So talking about one more specification is we have to know that in our industry, we are really a more emotional industry.  

And there was a study done in hospitality. It was more centric on hotels, but I really think it can apply to vacation rentals.  

And they could see that 59% of the weight of the decision comes from emotional trust factors. And the other part from 41% from rational.  

So definitely the emotional part is really something we have to work on. So when we are talking about presenting our properties, we're going to start with the rational trust factors. 

We are talking about all the amenities important to, to detail absolutely all the amenities included in our vacation rental to insist on safety, safety elements included in our properties. 

If we, depending on the guests we are focusing on, if we're talking about families with maybe young, young children, all the safety, safety features we have in, in our properties, everything related to cleaning protocols. 

These would be for me, the, the top let's say rational trust factors that we, we have to, to clear purely detail in in our, in the presentation of our properties. 

Then we have the real, the emotional, trust factors which are related with the pictures of our properties, including working in home staging. For those of you who maybe are not familiar with home staging, is all the techniques you can implement in your, in your properties to, to make the guests feel like home.  

Yeah, in our property management, we really saw the big difference between properties where we didn't do any home staging, where we didn't change furniture. 

We're not necessarily talking about important refurbishment or, but really in implementing,  a type of furniture we know that looks good and can really adapt to the type of guests we were searching for. 

And, sometimes it's hard to convince our owners to make this kind of investment. In our case, what we usually do when we are going to start managing, or we are negotiating to, to get a new property, if the, the property is not up to our standard, what we do is we pay for this home staging investment, and then we get back the money over the time with the rentals. 

So this is a good way to catch new, new properties without the property owner having to invest before getting the return on investment. 

And on our side, it's a way to,  to get new, new properties where we see, when we see that there is a big potential for these properties. 

And it helps us to have similar kinds of standards in terms of who can feel in the, in the properties in terms of rational, emotional, factors. 

When we present our properties, there will be the description to, to make like a description of our listing, which is not only focused on describing the elements including our properties, but really insisting in the emotional making like an, an emotional description of our properties. 

We also have to take advantage, we are on our own website to include the additional elements that are not present in the OTAs, in Booking.com or Airbnb, and like, for example 360 virtual tours or videos that really help to to see better what, what is the full the phone properties and have no doubt of what is the view taking from the pictures. 

 Let's go on with everything related to the interaction and the personal engagement. 

What I mean with this, and we are talking about emotional and rational, both everything related to communication, and not only communication, but also to have very clear who is our buyer persona. 

And this is, for me, one of the keys to generate trust, which is having really specific content related to our, to our what we call in marketing our buyer persona, which is our ideal guest. 

And this is something many property managers do not spend enough time to define their ideal guest. 

And sometimes we may think, and it was my case initially, to think that the, the more generic you are, the more you try to apply to anyone, the higher the highest occupancy we will get and more direct, more mobile bookings. 

Generally speaking, we'll have, but the truth is the more specific and the clearer we have our ideal guest, the better we will address them making specific communication in our case. 

For example, what we did is to build landing pages on our website. 

We already have two main buyer personnel families in summer and Northern Europe retired in winter. We only rent monthly in winter from November to March. 

And for example, in this winter, we have over 75% occupancy, which is absolutely incredible in a vacation destination. 

And recently I could check some data to compare with AirDNA, they launched a new feature that allows you to compare yourself with respect to your competition.

And I could see that all year long, the average occupancy in my destination was 52%. And on our side, we have a 76% occupancy all year. 

We have the highest occupancy in our destination. 

And the, the, the key of this success for me is really because we, we have a very clear who is our ideal guest, we are really addressing to, to them, we created these landing pages that succeed to rank good in Google. 

And we are getting many bookings, especially in low season, and which allows us to, to get this percentage. 

So for me, really, one of the keys is really to, to, to be able to address your, to your buyer personnel. But yeah, interaction and personal engagement. 

So on one side, addressing to your buyer personnel, having a real communication when you communicate with them to have a personalised communication and on your website includes several important parts that will create this connection also with your, with your guest. 

About us page, which is sometimes a page that we do not spend enough time to, to define and to, and to tell how our history is in our business, why we are here. 

And, talking about yourself and creating this connection with your, with your guest. 

Talking about our values. Values are also a clear trust, trust factor to saying what are your, your main values? 

And depending on your business and who you are addressing, you will have different values.

And then also a FAQ section is probably more rational than emotional, but it's also a good way to respond to the most frequent question we have that will make you save time later and not get so many, so many questions. 

And the one of the rational sections, which is having a clear and secured booking process with a clear cancellation policies, clear pricing if something is not included saying what I mean it has to be very clear what what's not included. 

And then the booking process is also easy, not too many steps and with secured payment. 

And the final part of this is, presenting all these trust factors is the third party validation and social proof. So what are we talking about? 

That on one side, 100% rational third party validation, which is if you are associated with any association in your country or international international association, or if you have any safety label or any kind of label, you can present, it'll generate proof. 

There's also a company I-Prac that gives you a label saying yes, this property manager is a real and they make validation of your, of your property management. 

So all these logos will add third party validation and certification about your business. And then we have other factors that are a mix of rational and emotional. 

We're talking about anything related to social to social networks, but also,  if you have the, if you have been named or mentioned in any magazine or newspaper in your, in your region, do not hesitate to to mention that. And last, and not least, obviously, your reviews. 

And we are, and we are talking about your, your reviews, not only your direct reviews, but your OT reviews, definitely having the ability to display your average star rating over the different different OTAs is a very important and strong way to increase trust. 

So this is the first part. 

Uh, I don't know if you have any question about about this first part of the presentation?

Kelly:

Let me have a look. 

There's no questions coming through from the people who are here. 

I was just wondering if you were looking at that selection of different trust signals and you hadn't done any of them, where would you start? 

What would be your first step that people should go away and do today? 

Christophe:

Yeah, that's a good one. And I think ready for the first one would be to focus on who, who is your ideal guest? Really, for me, this was already part of what changed.  Yeah, there was a before and after when we decided ready to focus and to know first to know who, who is our guest, because really everything will will then depend on that, depending on who is your ideal guest, you will adapt you'll be able to adapt your your properties and add all the necessary furniture elements that, are important for you, for your guest. 

You'll be able to make a good description focusing on, on, on your guest. 

Uh, you'll be able to create specific contents, specific learning pages that will be able to rank better because on, on Google, we will never be able to to compete with OTAs for generic searches generic searches like short-term rental in, in number but if we are focusing on pet friendly rentals in pet friendly apartment, personal event or any, I mean the more specific you are in terms of the, the, the, the guest you want to, to attract will allow you to, to create specific content. 

And this specific content obviously has less searches, but we are talking about searches that convert very, very well.

And here there's really a way to, to reach the first results. And this is something we have achieved spec specifically for winter stays and also for pet friendly, which is our third buyer personnel, our main two families.  

And uh, let's say, retired people in low season, but Pet-friendly would also, is also an important one that applies at, at the end to, to both to pet-friendly families and pet friendly retail people. 

And we have a specific content for that. 

And we reached the first result for these searches and got a lot of direct bookings thanks to this,  to this content.  

So to your question, yeah, my first point really would be to focus on, to clearly know who is your your buyer persona, because I mean, it's also like a virtuous circle in the sense, and when you attract your ideal guest, you will give him a good experience. 

Good experience will lead to good, to good reviews, and good reviews will lead to more bookings. So, this is really a key, a key point for me. 

Kelly: 

Okay. Lovely. Thank you. There is a question that's just come in from Valerie who's asking if it's necessary to have, I'm not actually sure if she's saying a flash or flashy professional webpage.  

Christophe: 

Uh, not sure flashy what, what you mean by flashy. 

I mean, having a good looking professional website is definitely a trust factor. 

Yeah. It's true that I didn't add it in my I could add it as a key point because I, I mean, when you, when you reach a website that looks from the nineties and which looked like more paper, paper leaflet than a good website, it would, it'll be related to, yeah.

To have a good website with a good booking process with few, few steps. I mean, all this definitely is, is important. 

Kelly: 

Yeah. Mm-Hmm. I agree. 

And I was also thinking about other factors, like, you know, if you, if you want people to be coming on your website, you want people to be converting, it's not necessarily a trust factor, but you know, it's gotta be fast. 

It's got to be, it's got to be attractive, it's got to have the right information available that people need, otherwise they'll just walk away. 

So yeah, I think professional, yes, but professional doesn't necessarily mean it has to be expensive. 

There are options out there that would give you good looking, professional looking sites that you can add those trust factors to that will get you those direct bookings. 

Christophe: 

No, absolutely. I mean,  you, you can perfectly have a handmade website using templates from Wordpress or Wix, which has a very good, very good looking website, which doesn't cost much, but at least the look and feel is okay. 

And then and then have an integration to present your properties with your, with your PMS is also key to have the booking engine and everything well, well integrated. 

So yeah, professional, professionally looking, yes expensive, not, not necessarily. Mm-Hmm, exactly. 

Kelly:

And I'd like to add that if you don't know that books have websites, we also do websites as well, so you can have instant websites, which are free, that will incorporate a lot of these trust signals that you're talking about today. So absolutely, that would be the next step. 

Christophe: 

Okay. Let's move on. So yeah, let's go deeper into details about the importance of reviews. 

So, the first thing is out of all the criteria of selection of an accommodation, and we're talking hospitality, generally speaking, including hotels and vacation rentals reviews are the, the third most important factor after location and value from. 

So definitely your reviews play a very important role to get more bookings. 

Uh, there are several studies from Transparent, if you are not familiar with Transparent, it's a big data company in our industry, which analyses millions of listings in the, in the main OTAs. 

And they analyse what is the impact of the review score. 

So above four, or more, there, there was a general five point average occupancy higher for, for these properties. 

But the average star rating is not the most important. 

The really the most important is the mix between good reviews and a good high number of reviews. 

When we are talking about the number of reviews, they could see that listings with over 20 reviews had, generally speaking, an occupancy of 90% more occupancy than listings with zero reviews. 

So definitely it's a mix of having good reviews, but also a good high number of reviews talking about Airbnb and the impact of being superhost, they could see that being superhost allowed them to have an average daily rate high $7 more expensive for Superhost and 9 points higher occupancy rate. 

So being Superhost or not, definitely there is an impact for that. So now, the idea was to present the top 5 mistakes. 

Top mistakes of a property manager

As property manager, we do sometimes with the trust factors, not using them properly which present prevent us to to get the most out of them, and to, to increase to increase our direct bookings. 

So the first one would be to showcase only good reviews. 

This is something I did myself, and I could see that many at the end property managers cherry pick on our website and display only good reviews. And there are several reasons for that.

The first one is only five star reviews and is too good to be true. 

And even if it's true, it can seem counterintuitive, a few negative reviews at the end. What it does is to increase credibility and authenticity for the massive number of good reviews. 

We have, and this can be seen in some other analysis when we check the conversion rate according to the average rating. We're not talking about vacation rentals. 

It's so analysis general, but where we can see what is the evolution of the conversion rate, depending on the average review score, and we can see the peak is 4.9.

And for companies with only five star reviews, the right goal goes down. 

And the reason is what we saw earlier on to only five stars is too good to be true. 

And as there are so many fake reviews, not only in, in our industry, but generally speaking in any businesses, at the end, yes, we all know that things happen.

And when we manage dozens or hundred properties and with hundreds or thousands of guests every year necessarily, things happen and there's always little small reviews, even if it hurts us, this happens. 

And we don't have to hide these reviews. 

We have to respond well.

We'll talk about that later on, but a few bad, you have to keep this in mind, a few bad reviews do nothing but give more credibility to high reviews, to the best reviews. 

And also another analysis showed how consumers who filter bad reviews end up converting better than than 108% better, higher than the average. 

And the conclusion was at the end, these bad reviews allow the consumers to, to see what is the worst possible scenario. 

Because what happens also is we can get bad reviews for, for something, for already a detail or something that can be considered as a detail. 

So, this kind of review will absolutely not impact our conversion if it's compensated for obviously by uh, another massive amount of good reviews. 

The second Kelly, just let me know if there's any, any question we have going.

Kelly:

No, actually that question specifically answered some of the questions that I received from our clients. 

So, it's really good to know that cherry picking actually isn't the right way to go about things. Yeah, So that's good.  yeah. 

Christophe:

Second mistake would be not responding to all reviews. 

And this is also a mistake I made myself at the beginning. And the reason was because it helps to increase conversion.

At the end responding to reviews is not only a way to show our past guests appreciation about his review, but it's also a way to show our potential guests that we will take care of them. 

And generally speaking, this is really what we, where we can see the paret equation, you know, only 20% property manager or host general speaking respond to all reviews and 80% just respond to bad reviews or do not respond at all. 

So it's really a way to be different, and to go to make a good service to show how you care about your, your potential guest. 

And it'll have an impact on conversion. 

And to the, to the question from another company, Bright Local that makes every year a very strong survey about reviews in all the businesses or generally speaking not, not only in vacation rental and location, how probable are you to, to use a company based on its responsiveness to reviews? 

And there's, you can, you can see the, the very, the strong difference between those that respond to absolutely all reviews and those that respond to just one or not.  and you have to know also that replying to reviews also has an impact on SEO. 

And this comes from Google themselves where they mentioned that responding to reviews can, can have an, can improve the business visibility. 

We're talking here about Google my Business, but every content we generate is also good for our own website. So it is definitely important to respond to reviews. 

Another mistake would be to not use third party reviews on, on our own website. 

So what, what we, when we're talking about third party reviews, we are talking about having the ability to display all your reviews. 

You have to know that your own or our own reviews probably have the lowest credibility precisely because of the fact that, as some sometimes some property manager cherry pick and only show five star reviews, we, we know that we have more flexibility to, to make this kind of action on, on our with our own reviews. 

So the real way to build trust for real is not only showing our own reviews, but the, I mean the globally all, all our review score. 

And this is this, this is really what, what will bring trust to display that showing that there is like a certain current in the review score across all the, the OTAs, I say certain because recently I did, we made analysis from from reviews from our company showing how there's a big difference between OTAs themselves and depending if the star rating is out of five or out of ten, and we could see that globally, Booking.com reviews have a lower average average star rating. 

So you, you may check on your side if this also applies while on Airbnb and Vrbo, the average star rating was higher. 

And one of the conclusions is the fact that if a review score is out of 10 for example, eight out of 10 seems psychologically higher than the four out of five on another, another OTA.  

So there are always some, some differences, but at the end she shows absolutely all your star rating, really shows transparency and this will impact your trust factor. 

And there's a marketing concept called the effect source, the effect of multiple sources, also from by Bright Local mentioning that 70% of consumers consult several review websites before selecting a company. 

And the consumers give more trust and authority to ideas expressed by different sources. 

Well, I'm going to go quickly on that but it's important to know that OTAs themselves are also using a third party, and this was the case for Vrbo that made for every new listing on Vrbo, they were showing this property is new on Vrbo, but has already reviews on the other OTA and they were showcasing the review score, a number of reviews from from Airbnb. 

And they could you, you can see here the increase in bookings and the night reserve and and the value of the booking. And the same for booking.com they,  they're also, showcasing for properties, new properties in, in booking they're showcasing, they have already star rating a number of reviews for these properties. 

We can see them in a different colour, with respect to the Booking.com reviews. 

So if OTAs are showcasing third party reviews, this is already because it works. So I definitely, I invite you to do the same and use this technique in your, in your own website. 

Another mistake is to not use,  trying to use rich snippets or rich snippets when we talk about rich snippets is the show showing the direct star rating and number of reviews on Google.  

And this is there is a strong impact on the click through rate, depending on the number of reviews and the average star rating. 

So to implement these zero eight snippets you can use for example, our widget include, include them, and there are some additional impact on SEO to have more content. 

Uh, the time is the, the length of the time spent on your website that will increase less bounce rate. Bounce rate is uh, users coming to your website. 

And that does not interact. 

The more content and interesting content you have on your website, it'll increase your USEO and your more, more SEO means more, more traffic. 

So very, very important to work on that. And the, the last mistake I wanted to, to present you is failing to rank your your plan press reviews, and I invite you to make the, the test once we finish this webinar to search for your company plus reviews AVI in French opinions in, in Spanish, depending on where, where your your guests come from. 

And the, the priority, if you haven't done anything specific, you will, when you search for your company plus reviews in the first result will appear OTAs, unless you have a specific webpage, and it's pretty easy to,  to position. 

 I will not get into details, but Kelly will send you the presentation if you want to, to get more, more, more detail on how to do it really. 

Unless you have a, let's say, generic name like Edinburgh Rentals,  if you have a proper, proper name, it'll be very easy to raise the full results. 

And it's very important because when a potential guest sees your brand in an OTA, many of them will not just search for you. 

They will search also for you plus reviews to, to, to make sure you are a good property manager. 

So it's an important page to work on, and really you can easily rank in the first result, and especially also if you use, if you use a widget as we have.  

Kelly, do we have any, anything around all this? I'm just looking at the questions.

Kelly:

Nope, we haven't got any of the questions, so we're Good. Okay. 

Christophe:

So just to, to finish a quick note about who we are, we are specifically designed to help property managers and hosts regain control over your property reviews. 

You will be able to automatically collect all your reviews from the main OTA and also other, other portals like, Google, Google My Business or Trust Index and what you will be able to do is to centralise absolutely so absolutely all your reviews in one in one place, in one in one dashboard. 

The fact to showcase your reviews on your own website really has this strong impact we could see in terms of, to generate trust and increase your, your conversion. Also to increase your traffic. 

Thanks to the rich snippets, we are also going to, to launch next week a new, a new feature to specifically thought for for a CO and to, and to rank your, your brand, your brand, and your,  your brand plus reviews as we, we saw earlier. 

And also we integrated with charge GPT to automatically generate responses,  to the reviews. 

We saw earlier the importance of responding to all reviews, but also it's a pretty time consuming task, especially if you want to do it. Uh, well, and not saying just thanks for your message, but let, let's say, having your proper content for the, for the response, it, it takes time. 

So using this integration, it'll already help you to, to save time. And yeah. So this is what I wanted to present to you today. 

Kelly:

That is amazing, and there's a lot of information in there. If you were to give one overarching tip, then what should people go away and do right now? 

Christophe:

I will insist again on what, what we mentioned earlier in terms of defining really what, what is your ideal guest, 'cause as, as we saw it's really a key, a key point that will affect the rest of your of your business in terms of the, the properties and who you want to attract the content you'll build in your website. 

Uh, so, for me, the first step will be really this one. 

The second one I would say would be to get into your guest shoes and uh, visit again on your website. 

 Make the customer journey to see all your pages and, and make sure and see which trust factor you include, and which you don't to make this section and, and try to, to see which one you would you, you could you could implement and you could improve in your, in your business. 

And, the third one really to, to take action to test a solution as ours to see how, how it works to see what is the impact really. See what is your current situation right now in terms of what is your direct bookings?  What is your percentage of direct booking? 

You also have to know tha the strategy takes some time. 

You want to change from I mean from one day to, to another. And this is something that you have to give it a chance several months to, to see the evolution.  

But definitely the last tip is to take action and not to keep staying with the knowledge, but implement the knowledge and then analyse what have been the, the improvements or not. 

But at least give it a, give it a try, give it a chance and see, see what you can do in your, in your own business. 

Kelly: 

Fantastic. Okay. So I can see we've put the slide up there with how to contact you, how to contact Bookster. 

So Bookster and Reviews have a new partnership. 

So if you want any more information about how that could work on your custom website or on your template website or on your own third party website, just get in touch. 

More than happy to give you some information on that. And I'll be sending out this video with the questions and the answers. 

And I noticed,  Christophe, that on your website, you've got a really good blog post about how to deal with those negative reviews if people are worried that they've got some negative reviews. 

Yeah. 

So I'll, I'll put the link to that as well. 

Sure. I think that'd be really useful. Yeah. Oh, we've got one final question before we leave. 

Can we just have a look at that one? 

It is from Anna who's asking, when you click on the reviews widget on your website, for example, the Airbnb one, does it actually take you to all the reviews or does it show the individual star ratings for different sites?

Christophe:

You mean if you see all the content of the reviews, or So does it take you to all the reviews? 

Kelly:

So I guess one part of that question is does it take you to Airbnb? 

I guess if you're clicking on that, which is interesting, or does it just show you all the star ratings?

Christophe: 

This is my own property management website.  

So here, here's one that has several different templates. 

This is the one I chose. 

When you, when you click on it, what you get is on one side, see here you have the, the average star rating globally, including all the, all the properties and all the reviews. 

And here you have the split over the different RTAs. 

 

This one is our direct review. 

 

You, you, what you, you get also is one link for all you, for each of your properties to request to your direct bookers to leave,  to leave a review. 

 

 and you, you have,  well, you, you can see where the review comes from, and you, you do have there, there's a link to the property on the OTAs mainly to give this additional trust factor,  where, where they can see that absolutely. 

 

I mean, the, the, the, the re all the reviews are aggregated and,  and there is no selection, you know, where showing to the, your potential guests that you're not just precisely what we mentioned earlier,  cherry picking or selecting only, only good good reviews. 

 

So adding the, the link back to the, to the, to the source where the review comes from is a, is a, is an important factor. 

 

And what we do also is all, we also collect the responses. 

 

 so, so the, the, the guest really has the potential to have all, all the information. 

And we also mentioned earlier the importance of, of, of the responses. 

 

So you get all the, all the details in your,  in your, in your widget. Is it, is it fantastic. 

 

Did we respond to the question? 

 

Kelly:

I think you've responded perfectly. And we all know also if we want to go to Calpe, which website we have to come to. 

 

Christophe: 

Absolutely. We are waiting for you. 

Kelly:

All right, perfect. 

If you have any questions, just drop us a note. 

If you have anything else, Christophe, that you'd like to add before we leave. 

Christophe:

Take action.

My final advice, I mean, I think we had a good view of what are the trust factors and and now you, it's your turn to see what you are doing already, what you can test and already retake, take action and give me, give me a shout with the conclusion you get from the actions you take. 

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Christophe Salmon shared his expert opinion on using Trust Signals on your holiday rental website to boost direct bookings.