Member-only story
The Customer Review Hack That Works
How we got 1,800 five-star reviews on TripAdvisor
In 2014 we opened the first escape room in Utah. Back then escape rooms were almost completely unknown. We had a huge uphill battle getting people to know what we were. I talked to some friends in the industry. They told me that the best way to build knowledge about our business was to rank high on TripAdvisor. With that in mind we tried everything we knew to get people to write reviews for us. We thought we were doing Okay, until about a year later one of our competitors passed us.
The Crisis
To me this was a crisis that we had to solve. I’m not good at being second. It didn’t make sense. We were in a better location. We had a better product. We had way more traffic than our competitor. Yet they were getting more reviews and passed us in the rankings.
I tried everything I could think of to get more reviews with little success. Part of the problem was TripAdvisor’s rules. They didn’t allow us to give customers incentives for writing reviews. They delisted companies they caught giving incentives for reviews. About the only thing we could do to get reviews was to ask for them.
To write a review customers had to create an account on TripAdvisor. Almost all our customers were not registered. While…
