Every single time I have this conversation with a tour operator or hotel manager, it turns out they're asking less people, less often than their competitors.

I understand it may feel cringe to ask for reviews repeatedly, and of course you don't want that to affect the actual experience, but if you're not getting as many reviews as the others, it's almost always because you're not asking as much.

Simple as that.

Now that we agree on the premise, the rest of this article is about finding ways of asking more people, more often without degrading the experience.

This is by far the most impactful thing you can do.

Last November, we ran a poll in Tourpreneur, a Facebook community of tour operators. 45% of the operators who answered incentivize their team for reviews, and most of those pay $5 per review.

Incentives don't have to be boring either. You can start with a simple model granting a flat $5 for every captured review for example.

As business grows, you can add more elaborate versions of this, filtering out empty reviews, factoring in the review conversion rate instead of only the number of reviews, etc.

The most basic way of handling this is to have the guests mention their guide's name in the review. You can then look through reviews and count reviews that mention each person.

This works well, up to a point. Eventually you'll start getting typos, mis-spellings, homonyms, etc. and your guides will contest your count virtually every month.

Not to mention that getting an exact date for any of your reviews can be a challenge.

If this is becoming a significant enough problem for you, our attribution system leverages AI to find any version of any name from your team list in your reviews.

We also integrate with most booking software solutions, allowing us to attribute reviews to the right guide based on the booking itself (and the reviewer name), even when the guide's name isn't mentioned on the review.

As for any incentive though, it is critical that your staff know how they're doing. The incentive structure needs to be transparent and clear enough that everyone knows where they stand at any point during the month.

You need to be able to identify who's getting results, and who needs coaching.

Whether you want to make everyone's results accessible to everyone is up to you and to the kind of company culture you want to have.

While it's helpful for anyone on the team to know how they're doing compared to the others, they probably don't need to know exactly who is first and who is last.

You can make this part of your weekly or daily routine, or send regular updates to your team.

The great thing about a leaderboard though is that it's so visual.

Anyone from your team coming in to pick up their gear or chat about something can peek and see how they're doing.

One of the most impactful ways of asking for reviews is by giving something for free to your guests, after the tour, when you know they'll be debriefing about their day.

A classic is to take pictures on the tour with your own phone, and then send a message later with all the photos.

At the end of the tour, recommend a few places for lunch or drinks. Inevitably, most of your guests will be looking for a place to chill, debrief, use the wifi to check on their email and socials, etc.

That's when you send the photos, along with a nice note + link asking for a quick review.

Of course, on the tour, you've mentioned reviews repeatedly (without being too insistent), and you've said you'd send that link after the tour

If photos don't really apply here, there are a million pretexts you can use instead. List of your favorite restaurants. Link to a great video explaining something in detail. Great website with discounts to buy this or that.

The main idea is to get the customer's preferred contact method if you don't have one already, and to send them the request at the right time, when they're in debriefing mode.

If this applies, you can also leverage "downtime" during the tour. If there's a long drive back for example, and you know that most of your guests will have access to the internet, of course, use that time to give value and ask for a review.

This one might be the least obvious.

Of course once you have reviews, you want to show them to new customers, and most of the people I talk to want more reviews to drive more new business.

Fair.

But don't underestimate the power of showing reviews all along the customer journey.

What this does is signal how important reviews are to you and your business, and it makes the whole asking process much smoother.

Odds are you'll be sending out customer communications ahead of the tour right? Booking confirmation, details on where to meet, etc.

Make sure you include something about your reviews in every one of those communications.

"Rated 4.9 on Tripadvisor" with a link to Tripadvisor.

"Our customers love us" with a link to your tour page with a bunch of reviews about the tour.

People read those.

They're excited about the tour. They want to know what they're getting into, without all the marketing speak. They want to hear from past guests.

Give them the opportunity to do that, and they'll be much more inclined to share as well when the time comes.

Asking for a review is certainly one of the most awkward things you can do as customer facing staff, which is why most people hate doing it.

Practice is what takes this from an awkward thing you'd rather not be doing, to muscle memory.

Script the ask, coach your staff, practice the actual ask with them, make everyone comfortable asking