Google has taken bigs steps into the tours and activities space, especially with the release of its new Touring Bird app. 

Google has also announced direct and instant booking connections with FareHarbor, Checkfront, Peek and several others. The moves are significant as the company’s continued expansion into the space of promoting tour and activity bookings.  Google is now using it’s powerful search platform to help people discover and plan their trip based on popular sights gathered through its rankings and mapping them out. Google Reviews for your business are becoming more and more important as a tour and activity operator. 

This means your tour could easily pop up in one of the curated trips or recommended activities and your Google Reviews will go a long way to help to get your business at the front and center of new customers.

So, what are the benefits of Google Reviews?

  1. You acquire testimonials to use in marketing your business:
  2. Build a better understanding of what you are doing right and/or wrong as a business
  3. It Improves, importantly for tours and activities, the visibility of your business on Google.

In particular, with the third point, it is becoming more and more important to have an online presence and one that has high-quality reviews on multiple platforms, but also a high quantity. Studies suggest that upwards of 80% of all consumers look at online reviews before deciding whether or not to purchase something. When it comes to tours the importance of reviews is stressed further yet. Families, couples and friends all come along to have an experience of a lifetime, they will likely opt for the more expensive tour, if they are seemingly guaranteed a better experience as indicated by the available online reviews.

Google wants to deliver the most relevant and beneficial results for local searches. They not only want to know what your business does but how your business is perceived. They do this, in large part, by seeing how many reviews you have and what your average customer rating is. This is being seen as a factor that Google uses in its SEO ranking.

With this in mind and the new Google travel products, there is no greater time to be putting in a concerted effort towards capturing more Google reviews for your business.

When using PicThrive tour and activity operators are able to get more Google reviews to help grow their business. When photos are made part of the experience, our powerful marketing tools enable guests to share and review directly after their experience. This will let you gain genuine reviews directly from your guests without having to manually reach out to them. With PicThrive you can sell more photos and videos after a tour or activity and generate that sweet sweet referral marketing for your business.