TripAdvisor Reviews On GMB Listing For Hotels

[resorts]

Open question to the experts in the community,...

Can you integrate TripAdvisor reviews on your GMB hotel listing?
If so, how? Is it from the TripAdvisor side? Is it from the GMB side? Or is it 100% unilateral, and you have ZERO control over whether it happens or not?

Here's the context:

We were actively trying to answer these questions for one of our major Las Vegas hotel/casinos, as their TripAdvisor ratings are quite good, and we wanted to see if we could push them into this area on GMB / Google Hotels...

and here...

The basis for our thinking was that... a while back (maybe a year or so) we saw TripAdvisor Reviews appear on GMB Listings for hotels. People still post this topic today quite frequently on TA, such as this thread here (example) - How to link TripAdvisor reviews to Google Business Account - Tripadvisor Support Forum

Naturally, TA refers all 'owner' accounts to their owner's forum for this question, which only owners of business listings can access to manage various attributes of their account and connections, but the only connection setting we found was this...

These settings didn't even seem to be active anymore. So we then posted our question on the Owner forum, but (as per the typical), we received this statement back from them....

...which refers us deeper into their 'owner' technical support portal. We (of course) left the same request for their technical team, and then THIS is what we got back...

So it would SEEM that TripAdvisor no longer has ANY control over whether it's reviews appear on a GMB for a hotel.

That being said, I wanted to open the questions up to the experts here, because I have audited a number of hotel GMBs now, and have not found any TripAdvisor Reviews on ANY of them,... even accounts that I know had them in the past.

Recapping the actual questions...

Can you integrate TripAdvisor reviews on your GMB hotel listing?
If so, how? Is it from the TripAdvisor side? Is it from the GMB side? Or is it 100% unilateral, and you have ZERO control over whether it happens or not?

Any thoughts, knowledge of this happening in the wild or even screenshots of it would be appreciated!

Thnx

 

[timcapper]

There is no way you can integrate yourself and TA reviews have not been used by GMB for quite a while.

I don't have a date to hand when they stopped using them (currently checking old tweets for rough date).

Not sure what they did to be dropped by G - there have been a lot of publicity around fake tripadvisor reviews in the past which may have been a factor.

On a side note about TA - They have never been a great OTA (bookings wise) and over the past two years they have dropped off the face of the luxury resort markets that I deal with.

 

[resorts]

Same and agreed. Thank you for your feedback. It is much appreciated.

 

[Jon Hall]

@timcapper is right on about TA reviews no longer being used in GMB listings. This is 100% controlled by Google, but perhaps instigated by TA. As someone who watched this kind of thing closely until a couple years ago (when I sold my review management company I think the history is interesting and reinforces Tim's point about TA's dwindling prominence, somewhat brought about by this spat.

The history begins with Google originally sourcing local review site data to make its listings and local results more useful. Then a few years ago, TripAdvisor and Yelp publicly decried Google's use of their data. They complained that Google effectively prevented searchers from visiting their sites and did so in furtherance of Google's own products and services, amounting to an anti-competitive abuse of its dominance in search.

Since Google had already begun to amass its own cache of native review content, and has data from willing publishers, why would it continue to include TA's and Yelp's content and risk the exposure to anti-trust action, by far its biggest threat? So Google "honored" the complaints by removing that content.

I'm not particularly sympathetic to the TAs and Yelps of the world, but this outcome was a lose-lose. TA and Yelp lost traffic and visibility. Consumers lost quality review content in search results (now Google includes scraped-together sites like RestaurantJi instead?).

Google won, I suppose, by remaining unaffected. Sigh.

 

[timcapper]

Totally @Jon Hall

They also had that terrible period of using Trust You before using reviews direct from the OTA's

The amount of bad data decisions Google make is pretty astounding.