A tour business like Drink•Eat•Walk relies on sites like Tripadvisor & Viator (the same company since 2014!), and Get Your Guide to bring in business, especially in the first season (I wrote about this here). The issue is that you can’t really get business on these platforms without reviews. Indeed, they state that they won’t really promote you on their sites until you have a minimum number of reviews (eg. it’s 15 on Tripadvisor).
So, how do you get business & reviews from a site that prioritizes reviews but won’t really send you business until you get reviews?
One way is to cheat: Create lots of fake accounts on those sites and then leave a review with each of them; Or get friends & family to leave reviews with their profiles on those sites, without ever having taken a tour; Or —and I swear I didn’t even look— I’m sure there are tons of sites out there where I could buy fake reviews.
I did not cheat, though, and will never cheat — in all things in life, I’m gonna ride or die with the truth. So, I have suffered the consequence of not getting much business in my first few months.
However, great news: I finally earned my way out of Tripadvisor probation this week, as I just received my 15th review there!
So, how did I get the tour guests and reviews? Great friends. They not only signed up for some of my first tours (and paid for them!), but pretty much all of them then left a review. Bonus: All the reviews have been ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ & glowing, which kinda makes me want to cry (but that’s a blog post for another day — this is a bizness post).
All that said & emoted, I also feel like I put in to work to increase the chances of a review happening.
First, I created a tour summary page that shows the tour route we walked, where we stopped, details exactly what we ate & drank, lists the stories I told on the tour, provides links for further reading, and then links out to an online album with the pictures I showed during some of the stories. So, I gave guests extra value.
Second, on that same page, I included a section with buttons/links for them to click to be taken to where to leave a review on each of the sites (that’s the image shown at the top of this post). So, I made it easier for them.
All guests then received an email and/or text with the private link to the tour summary page.
It worked! I’m honestly humbled by all of it. Friends are the best, for so many reasons. If you’re reading this, and you’ve taken a tour, thank you so much 😭. If you’re reading this and you haven’t, also 😭.
eyeintim 
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