Hospitality Industry NAP Oddities - Can You Explain Them?

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Everybody!

I haven't had much experience working with hotels or other forms of lodgings, and if you have, I would really like to ask you two questions.

A couple of days ago, I published a post on my blog:

SEO Igloo Blog ? Hotels A Hotbed For Local Business NAP Consistency Issues

In this piece, I noted that in market after market, tons of hotels were listing only their toll free number in TripAdvisor.com, one of the major citations sources for hotels. From my post:

But do you know how many of the top hotels in Chicago are following this same pattern of listing a single toll free number, instead of a local one, as their primary number on TripAdvisor? 9/20
That?s right. Nearly half of the hotels in this major city have citation consistency issues similar to what I?ve highlighted here, and the same thing is going on in city after city I?ve looked at. It?s a big, big problem.

On none of the listings I researched were two numbers listed. Not having access to a hotel client's TripAdvisor dashboard, I would like to know:

Question #1: Does the TA dashboard actually limit business owners to publishing a single number? If so, do you advise your clients to list the toll free number for guest convenience, or the local number for the sake of NAP consistency?

As to my second question - and this is not something I mentioned in my blog post - I saw listing after listing in TA with absolutely no published phone number at all. This really surprised me.

Question #2: Can you explain to me why a hotel would choose not to list any phone number on such a prominent local listing? Could it be that they don't want to take phone bookings and are relying or some other form of booking solution? Or, do you think that perhaps the lack of phone numbers on so many hotel listings is because the listings are unclaimed/neglected?

I would really appreciate the chance to learn from any of you who deal regularly with hospitality industry clients. I was very surprised by things I saw on TripAdvisor and am scratching my head trying to explain them. Thanks!