Travel Victoria – tourism blog

Author: Travel Victoria management team

  • Identifying those fake TripAdvisor accommodation reviews

    True or False
    True or false? Spotting those real or fake TripAdvisor reviews.

    The world’s largest and most popular holiday review site, TripAdvisor, publishes millions of reviews by those who have stayed at hotels and other types of accommodation around the world. The primary reason for its popularity is that one of the best ways to find out what to expect when staying somewhere is to actually read feedback by those that have been there before. After all, a slick website and the right photos can mask things like poor quality rooms and less than desirable service.

    TripAdvisor is not without controversy, as there is no mechanism in place to verify that the writer of a review actually stayed there.  So there may be fake reviews creeping in, either by disgruntled staff or guests, hotels trying to sabotage their opposition, or paid reviews by accommodation providers trying to boost their standing.

    One of the ways to possibly spot a fake review is by pasting the text of it into Cornell University’s Review Skeptic. They claim to use sophisticated language models that can identify whether a review is real or fake with an impressive 90% accuracy. They do state that it works best with hotel reviews worded in English.

    Give it a go!  Our boss here at Travel Victoria is an avid traveller, so we put his recent TripAdvisor reviews (which we know are absolutely 100% genuine) to the test. We took the 12 reviews he posted for accommodation he stayed at over the last 3 years and plugged them into Review Skeptic. The results were that out of those 12 reviews,  only one was reported as being “deceptive” and the remaining 11 were reported as “truthful”.

    With 92% accuracy in our real-world test of Review Skeptic, it’s quite impressive.

    While Review Skeptic was able to declare that 92% of our real reviews were genuine, we obviously don’t have any fake reviews to give it to check. So we can conclude that if a review is really true, then Review Skeptic is pretty good at picking that up. We leave it up to the reader to test how well it performs with fake reviews.

  • Be cautious of those offers to get your website to the top of Google

    marketing
    Marketing your website

    If you have a website, you will no doubt be a regular recipient of offers via email from website marketers who promise that their large company of professionals will make your website feature highly in Google.  However, before you take up an offer like that, carefully analyse the contents of their email and think about who they are and what they are offering.

    Consider this recent email we received:

    email
    A typical mass email offer by a marketing company to get your website to the top of Google

    There are some issues with this email which indicate that we’re probably not dealing with the large, well-known and internationally-respected organisation they portray themselves to be.

    1. The business development manager of this large company is using a free Gmail address to contact people rather than using something more official and directly linked to the company.
    2. Would you trust this company with the sensitive task of marketing your website when the business development manager writes emails which consist of grammatically incorrect sentences and have words incorrectly capitalised?
    3. Unless this company is Google itself, it cannot claim to get your website to the top of Google.  That’s because Google controls how websites are ranked using hundreds of factors that it alone determines. While a website marketer can exert some influence on Google rankings by boosting your website’s standing in some of those areas that Google looks at when analysing your site, they cannot guarantee to have the power to give you the exact ranking you request. Also, Google regularly changes its ranking algorithms, so even if this marketing company did manage to achieve the position you wanted with your website, it could all change tomorrow. The only way to guarantee a spot in Google’s search results is to take out a paid (sponsored) listing with them, and then throw lots of money at the search keywords of your choice.

    So be careful with trusting your website’s marketing to an organisation that can’t organise its own email addresses, can’t write proper English and to those that promise to deliver the impossible.  You might be disappointed.

  • Monitor the results of outsourcing of your website promotion

    outsource
    Be careful with outsourcing your web promotion.

    Outsourcing the job of promoting your website is becoming an attractive option for business owners who either don’t have the time or know-how to do this promotion themselves. However, you really need to keep a careful eye on what your promoter is doing, as if they are not professional about it, their work could end up damaging your business’s reputation rather than enhancing it.

    The people at Jensen Windows & Doors (www.jensenqld.com.au) appear to have employed someone from overseas to promote their website in what appears to be a less than professional way. How do we know? Someone based in the Philippines (as determined by looking up the submitter’s IP address) filled in our free listing form for tours and activities in Victoria in order to get their business and website displayed on the Travel Victoria website.  They specified that Jensen Windows & Doors, who are manufacturers of doors and windows in Queensland, conduct tours and activities around the Great Ocean Road coastal town of Aireys Inlet in order to trick us into approving the listing and displaying the website link. With their link published, they would have gained exposure by people clicking on the link and viewing their website.  Also, web search engines like Google would notice the link and treat it as a vote of popularity for Jensen Windows & Doors, thus possibly boosting their website’s ranking when people conduct searches for window and door manufacturers.

    While we obviously didn’t publish the free listing as requested by the person from the Philippines that Jensen have hired, it has however left us with a negative view of this Queensland-based manufacturing company that resorts to hiring people from Asia to get their business listed in inappropriate places.

    Promoting your business and website is serious stuff.  If you don’t have the time to do it yourself, ensure the person or organisation you outsource this task to is of a reputable nature.  Also ensure that the methods they use to promote your website are appropriate.  They should not spam and they should definitely not try to trick others into listing your website by misrepresenting your business.

  • Official tourism websites – Victoria vs. Tasmania

    Competition between the states with their tourism websites

    Each one of Australia’s states and territories has their own official tourism website.  If you own or manage an accommodation property, it is certainly beneficial to have some exposure on these official sites as they are used by a wide range of travellers.

    Victoria’s official tourism website is Visit Victoria, while Tasmania’s equivalent is Discover Tasmania.  When it comes to advertising your accommodation, they are quite different.

    Go to the Discover Tasmania website and you will find around around 1,050 accommodation listings for this small state with a population of 495,000 people (2011 Census). Pop over to the Visit Victoria website where there are around 1,400 accommodation listings in a state which is home to 5.35 million people.

    So why does Victoria, with more than 10 times the population of Tasmania and being home to the second largest city in Australia (i.e. Melbourne), have only a slightly larger listing of visitor accommodation on its official tourism website? It mainly comes down to cost.  Accommodation listings are free on Discover Tasmania, hence anyone operating an accommodation business in Tasmania can receive, at no cost, exposure on that state’s official tourism website. To do so, they just need to register their business in Tourism Tasmania’s TigerTOUR database.  In Victoria, accommodation listings on Visit Victoria cost $250 per year, although this is reduced to $100 for accredited tourism businesses. This cost therefore discourages some accommodation operators in Victoria from listing on Visit Victoria.

    This raises an important question. Should official tourism websites for Australia’s states and territories provide free accommodation listings in order to promote tourism and encourage people to stay overnight and contribute to the local economy?  Tasmania and Victoria appear to have different views on that idea.

  • Does your writing reflect your level of professionalism?

    Writing correctly
    Is your writing a reflection of your professionalism?

    Over the years, accommodation providers who list their properties on our Travel Victoria website have regularly said they want the facility to edit the wording within their advertisement themselves, rather than telling us what they want changed and waiting for that to be done. The fact we don’t offer that facility has many thinking it’s because we’re simply too lazy to set up such a self-serve editing system like what Stayz and Wotif offer to their clients.

    So why don’t we offer a self-editing system? It’s because some people write things riddled with spelling errors, inappropriate punctuation, errors with grammar and construct sentences that simply make no sense. We attempt to fix most of those things before the wording hits the web, so as to produce a more professional portrayal of the property being rented out.

    It’s surprising in this day and age with so much help from computers and the internet that people still commit many basic writing errors.

    1. Improper use of apostrophe for pluralisation. It’s amazing how many people believe that the plural of photo must be written as photo’s and that the last decade of the 20th century, the 1990s, should be written as 1990’s.
    2. Improper capitalisation of words. There is a tendency for people to capitalise words that shouldn’t be capitalised. Unless those words begin a sentence or are used as a specific title for something, the following should not be capitalised:
      • Seasons of the year (eg: summer, winter)
      • Common names of animal or plant species (eg: magpie, gum tree)
      • Compass directions used in a general sense (eg: north, south)
      • Titles of people used in a general sense (eg: prime minister, dentist)
    3. Wrong spelling of contracted words. Despite pronouncing “you’re” and “your” identically, some people still write “your correct” rather than “you’re correct” or its full expansion “you are correct”. Another common error is using “its” and “it’s” interchangeably when they actually mean completely different things.

    While not errors, we also try to weed out:

    1. Over-use of semi-obscure abbreviations. For example, some may use QS and SB to denote queen size bed and single bed in their accommodation description, but what they stand for may not be immediately obvious to some people.
    2. Writing lengthy sentences all in capitals. This may come across as “shouting” to some readers. A better way we use to try and emphasise sentences is to adjust the font, colour, size or weight of the text.
    3. Over-use of exclamation marks. While you may try to be creating an exciting scenario, ending every sentence in an exclamation mark loses its effectiveness after repeated use.
    4. Over-use of ampersand signs. It’s common to use the ampersand (&) in titles for space saving and to put more emphasis on other important words, but using an ampersand to replace every occurrence of the word “and” within regular paragraphs of sentences is over the top.
    5. Lack of paragraphs. Particularly if you’re in a hurry, there’s nothing more intimidating than to be confronted by huge slabs of sentences with no separating paragraphs to break up the flow into logical topics.

    The main reason we don’t have a self-editing system for accommodation advertisements is so that we can try and correct (the best we can) errors and confusing wording so that a potential guest reading it can more easily understand the message being conveyed. To some people, it can be very distracting to read something that has many basic writing errors, and that may negatively impact upon the impression of the property or its manager to potential guests.

  • Don’t put all your eggs in the one basket with Google AdWords

    Number one
    Your accommodation at number one on Google, but at what cost?

    For those marketing accommodation on the internet, Google Adwords is the easy way to get your website to the top of the page when people search for somewhere to stay. But the cost can be significant, and could you achieve similar results for considerably less cost?

    Firstly, most people searching on Google trust the unpaid (or “organic”) listings more than the paid listings, according to reports by Forrester Research.  After all, even the dodgiest business can get to No.1 on Google for a few dollars through paid ads, while a number one ranking on the organic listings is something that is based on hundreds of important factors, including your website’s content and the number of other websites providing links to it.

    Secondly, the cost of Google Adwords is significant and it is constantly rising as people bid higher and higher amounts to appear the top of the paid listings.

    Appearing at the top of the organic (unpaid) page rankings in Google for very generic accommodation terms is often beyond the power of a single accommodation provider’s website due to the very specific content they are presenting. So the next best option is to list that accommodation on the No.1 site that people click on. That provides access to an unlimited source of visitors, and they aren’t being charged for each one.

    Here is a specific case example. Say someone is looking to stay at Orbost, which is located half-way between Melbourne and Canberra (or about a third of the way to Sydney) if you’re driving via Gippsland along Victoria’s east coast. Orbost is an ideal place to stop overnight to break up that long drive. So a traveller would typically search for “Orbost accommodation” in Google, and at this precise moment in time, the results of that search are shown below:

    Searching for Orbost accommodation
    Searching for Orbost accommodation on Google

    Notice that “Orbost Motel” (at www.orbostmotel.com.au) is paying to have their accommodation at No.1 in the paid section. Using the Keyword Tool in Google AdWords, we estimate that to appear at No.1, and keep above the booking.com and wotif.com ads, they need to be prepared to pay up to $3 if someone clicks on them. Even if they only get one click per day, Google AdWords is costing them almost $1,100 per year. And there’s no guarantee that they’ll even get a single booking from that huge outlay.

    Now, what if Orbost Motel simply listed their property on the No.1 unpaid (organic) ranked website for Orbost accommodation, that being us here at Travel Victoria?  As soon as someone clicks on “Orbost accommodation” link, they would see the motel listed.

    The cost comparison is remarkable. Their AdWords campaign will cost a minimum of $1,100 annually – it could be even 2 or 3 times that amount depending on how many clicks they get. On the other hand, a fixed $69 annual listing with Travel Victoria gives them unlimited exposure/clicks gained from an audience that would more trust the page Travel Victoria has on Orbost accommodation than the paid listings at the top of the page.

    One of the accommodation properties listed on Travel Victoria in Orbost, Longhorn Ranch Units, had over 2,000 people looking at their full page property listing during 2011. At $3 per click in AdWords, those results would have cost them over $6,000 last year – a huge difference from the $69 they actually paid to achieve those results by simply listing on the No.1 website in Google’s unpaid section for Orbost accommodation.

    In summary, Google AdWords has its uses, but sometimes, depending on your circumstances, you can get a much better value from appearing on the website of a page that is ranked at No.1 in Google’s unpaid listings.

  • Are organisations shunning email communications with the public?

    Email
    Not getting a timely response to your emails when communicating with organisations? You're not alone.

    Email is great for quick and easy communication, however some larger organisations are increasingly treating email from the general public as no more than a nuisance and give low priority to dealing with it.

    Let’s consider a recent situation we experienced.  While developing our Dogs On Holidays website, we wanted to create a page containing links to specific pages on the websites of all Victorian coastal municipalities where they define which beaches are dog friendly and any associated conditions visitors had to abide by when bring their pet.

    We were able to find the required information about bringing dogs on beaches on the websites of 15 of the 18 coastal municipalities in Victoria, so it was just a simple job to link to their relevant pages. We couldn’t find the information we needed on the websites of the remaining 3 municipalities, which either meant we weren’t looking in the right place, or they simply didn’t publish it.

    Our next step was to email these 3 coastal municipalities, asking them where we could access information about bringing dogs on their local beaches.  By doing so, we discovered how responsive these organisations were to fairly straightforward and genuine requests for information.  Our expectation was an email response within 3 working days, however none of those municipalities managed to achieve that, although one came very close.

    1. South Gippsland Shire. With their headquarters Leongatha and covering the coastal communities of Venus Bay, Walkerville, Watarah Bay, Sandy Point and Port Welshpool, they were the quickest to respond.  They managed to reply in just over 4 business days from receiving our request.
    2. Corangamite Shire. Administered from Camperdown, this municipality covers the Great Ocean Road holiday towns of Port Campbell and Princetown. We received a response after 6 business days from the local laws officer.
    3. Colac-Otway Shire. Run from their headquarters in Colac, this shire covers the coastal areas on either side of Cape Otway including Johanna, Glenaire, Marengo, Apollo Bay, Skenes Creek, Kennett River and Wye River. The Colac-Otway Shire performed the worst out of our bunch of three. After 15 business days (3 weeks), we are yet to receive a response.  Too bad if we were planning a visit or holiday in the area. Maybe they want people with dogs to go further along the coast and into another municipality instead?

    Of course there’s no excuse for a non-reply after 3 weeks.  Even if the Colac-Otway Shire kept no records of which of its beaches dogs are allowed on, or if the question could have been better answered by another organisation, a quick reply to that effect would have been much more appropriate than simply ignoring the request for information.

    Unfortunately, this experience highlights what is sadly becoming all too common these days – organisations taking an eternity to respond to emails or simply not replying at all. Email communications is supposed to save time and money, but instead it seems to be an increasing source of frustration for individuals trying to communicate with organisations, only to endure long delays in receiving a reply or having their communications ignored.

    So if you’re working as part of an organisation, treat emails as important as phone calls or letters in the mail. We do here at Travel Victoria, so why shouldn’t you?

  • Make sure your website’s drop-down menus work on an iPad

    Apple iPad
    Getting those drop-down menus on your website to work on an iPad

    By the end of 2011, Apple had sold more than 55 million iPads worldwide. In many markets, sales of the iPad represented over 70% of tablet computer purchases. Therefore it is important to make sure your website is fully functional when used on an iPad.

    If you don’t have an iPad, one of the first things you can do is to view your website using the Safari web browser which is what iPads use by default.  Safari is available for Windows, Linux and comes standard on Macs.  You can download Safari for free.

    Unfortunately, using Safari on your PC or Mac isn’t quite the same as using it on an iPad.  One of the reasons is that “hover” events in HTML/CSS cannot be performed on an iPad. A hover event occurs when you hover your mouse over something, without clicking, causing an action, such as a menu to drop down. Interestingly, Android-based tablet computers emulate the hover action by allowing you to tap on the area which would cause something like a menu to drop down. This tapping is ignored on iPad and other Apple mobile devices.

    So if you have a website which uses a standard HTML/CSS drop-down menu (constructed using HTML list elements such as <LI>) and it relies on the “hover” event to make the menu items reveal themselves, then it probably won’t work on an iPad.

    There are many solutions which make the iPad behave like an Android-based tablet whereby clicking on a button will emulate a “hover” and display the full drop-down menu. Some solutions use JavaScript while others use code to try and detect if you’re using an iPad and work around it. There are many ways to accomplish this, however we began a quest to discover the quickest and simplest method of getting those drop-down menus to work on an iPad, and the solution ended up being trivial.

    To make a drop-down menu appear when someone taps on the menu button, all you need to do is add

    onClick=”return true”

    to the “A” tag within any list item (such as <LI>) that triggers a menu to pop up. This works for cascading menus as well.

    This simple workaround has no affect on people using web browsers on desktop or laptop computers – it just forces the menu to pop up on an iPad when someone taps on the menu button, which is equivalent to a click.

    We have verified this all works on a couple of websites we manage that use HTML/CSS drop-down menus:

    1. Beach Stays
    2. Dogs on Holidays

    Originally, the drop-down menus on those sites failed to operate on an iPad due to the missing “hover” functionality, making it impossible to access the hidden menu items and forcing people to go through the tedious routine of returning back to the home page to access an index of the website’s contents. Once we explicitly defined a click action to emulate a hover, suddenly those drop-down menus began working (when you tap on them) just like on a desktop computer!

    Due to the popularity of iPads, it is important to make sure all parts of your website work correctly on them, including those HTML/CSS drop down menus which are becoming quite popular nowadays.

     

  • Spend more time growing your business than debt collecting

    Getting paid without having to take on the role of a debt collector

    It’s the bane of any business’s existence – trying to extract payment from those who owe you money. Ideally, you’d prefer to devote your time to actually running and developing your business, yet nowadays in these economic challenged times, many businesses seem to spend more and more time on the unpleasant task of debt recovery. There has to be a better way.

    An important piece of advice is not to alienate your customer. Yes, they haven’t paid their bill, so you could go all out and threaten to bring in a debt collector or pursue legal action as a matter of principle. However, this approach may not only destroy the business relationship you have with this person, but they may go out of their way to tell everyone about your heavy-handed approach to payments.

    Some options to consider for encouraging people to pay their bills are:

    1. Offer a discount for payments made on time. Some organisations have started doing this, including Australia Post and a few electricity retailers. There’s nothing like a bit of financial incentive to pay bills on time and you’d be surprised how many will make the extra effort just to save a couple of dollars. While you may oppose, in principle, to the concept of paying people to actually do the right thing and pay your invoice on time, think of it another way. What appears to the client as a discount for on-time payment could actually be your standard price, and for those who pay late, they are actually getting charged a penalty for not paying on time which they believe is just the standard price.
    2. Suspend services when a bill is overdue. If someone is purchasing an on-going service, then this is a persuasive form of encouragement to get people into action. If someone’s website suddenly goes off-line, you’d be surprised how quickly people will leap into action to rectify this, even if they’ve been repeatedly warned that non-payment will result in loss of services in the past. Some people tend to ignore warnings, but a suspension will usually get them to instantly rectify any outstanding payments.
    3. Request payment up-front. Here at Travel Victoria, we recently implemented a policy that we don’t start work for new clients unless we are paid in advance for our services. We’ve found this very effective as no time or effort is spent trying to recover payment from a client after we’ve finished our work. It also has the added advantage of weeding out those people that are “tyre kickers” and who aren’t fully committed to a business relationship with us. However, one disadvantage is that new clients must trust us to do the work when they pay in advance, which may deter a few people from dealing with us.
    4. Clearly highlight the terms of their contract and their commitments. It’s unfortunate, but an increasing number of people are simply ordering things or purchasing services with their brain turned off, forgetting who they have signed up with, what they are buying or what the payment arrangements are. Make sure you keep proper records so you can show someone what they have ordered, their acceptance of your conditions, and when payment was due . Most people, when confronted with a simple list of their actions and where they have broken the conditions of sale, will rectify the situation as a matter of pride.

    Running a business should be all about serving your customers and growing your business, not the delicate, stressful or unpleasant task of debt recovery. So think about some policies you can implement to ensure that you quickly and easily get paid.

  • Your accommodation property’s website – who’s looking at it?

    www
    Low-cost ways of getting travellers to visit your website

    An accommodation provider may typically spend between $1,000 and $5,000 getting a website developed for their business. A professional image is created, all facets of the accommodation are on show, but who is looking at it?

    The next step many make is to then market their accommodation on commission-based travel websites, such as Stayz, Take-A-Break and Wotif. While you’re generating good business from these popular and high-traffic websites, your brand new shiny website sits there, unused.  This is because most high profile travel websites that market your accommodation do so on a commission basis (i.e. they take a percentage of the revenue you earn from each booking), and thus won’t allow you to display your contact details or a link to your elaborate website, otherwise they may lose a sale if you contact the property directly.

    So how do you get extra people to find your website when they are on the internet?

    1. Pay-per-click search engine advertising. Use a search engine like Google, and you’ll notice ads appear related to your search terms. Sign up to Google AdWords and pay for your website to get listed in these advertiser sections. The problem is that unless you’re going to target niche search terms, then buying ads that appear when people search for things like “accommodation in Ballarat” could cost you several dollars per click. Do the sums and unless you’ve got deep pockets or get a lot of bookings, this can be quite an expensive option.
    2. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). You employ an SEO expert to make changes to your website such that search engines like Google will rank your site highly for search terms of your choice.  To see results, you may need to wait months or years, and still there can be no guarantees as per our recent article on ranking high on Google. SEO alone is not enough as the wording on your website is just one of hundreds of points Google considers when ranking websites for certain search terms.
    3. Listing your business and website on a popular travel website. While there’s not many, there are a few travel websites which will happily advertise your accommodation and allow you to display your phone number, email address and a link to your website. They typically charge a fixed fee (like a newspaper advertisement) as they cannot collect commissions or track bookings while all your details on show to prospective guests. By choosing a travel website that ranks well in Google for general search terms related to your accommodation, you’re effectively getting items (1) and (2) listed above for a modest fixed fee.

    Given that the cheapest and easiest way to get exposure for your website is to list it on a travel website, you may wish to consider:

    1. Travel Victoria – that’s  us!  For a small annual fee, you get a full page listing of your accommodation property, complete with phone number, email address and link to your website. In January 2012, our most popular listing by far, Lorne Caravan Park, was viewed by almost 2,000 people, with over 500 of them clicking through to the caravan park’s website. Generating those clicks using advertisements on Google, assuming $2 per click, would have cost the caravan park $1,000 compared to just $5 for their listing in January. Our average click rate for all listings in January 2012 was 31, so that’s still an expected $62 cost in Google AdWords versus $5 on Travel Victoria.
    2. Weekend.com.au. Whether you get a free listing or a paid listing, your website link gets displayed, allowing you to funnel traffic to your website.
    3. Great Places To Stay. If your accommodation is “special”, a listing on GPTS includes all your contact details and a website link, directing people to fully explore your offerings on your own website.

    So don’t ignore the low cost and high value method of giving exposure to your website by listing it on a popular travel website. For a fixed fee, the visitors you attract can be endless.