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How to use Yelp for your hotel’s direct booking strategy

June 08, 2012 | Hotel Marketing

Yelp doesn’t just attract the vacation savvy crowd, but caters a more eclectic demographic including locals, avid shoppers, gourmands and bar hoppers. With nearly a decade’s worth of accumulated listings and reviews, the site is now a leading third-party reference hub.

For starters, Yelp can do wonders for your SEO if you maintain up-to-date business descriptions, website links and photos. Plus, you can monetize your involvement through special offers, announcements, pay-per-click ads and group buying services. It’s these sorts of low-cost, easy-to-run promotional tools that can increase your presence amongst the emergent class of Yelp users and possibly generate a few new leads.

By far the most powerful facet is its reviews. Using similar tactics to what you might use for TripAdvisor, receptive and cooperative responses can go miles to reaffirm participants and build goodwill amongst potential customers surfing the digital landscape. Moreover, Yelp is another outlet to gather constructive feedback, and due to its key demographic contrasts from other online travel sites, you’re bound to get a different scope of opinions about your operations.

What's more, reviews seem to be skewed towards those places with an already outstanding track record and posters don’t seem to be as lenient as on TripAdvisor. So let’s face it; if you manage a 1-star or 2-star property, your reviews won’t be all that phenomenal, and Yelp will only serve to highlight this mediocrity. Additionally, with other third-party sites like Hipmunk starting to incorporate Yelp reviews into their search aggregates, it’s a further disincentive for hotels with low overall scores.

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