Online reviews influence the purchase decisions of 93% of consumers. When potential customers research your business, they read what previous visitors have said and treat those reviews like personal recommendations from people they trust. Social proof and word of mouth are among the most powerful forces in tourism marketing — but only if you have enough reviews to make an impression. Here's how to get more of your customers sharing their thoughts publicly.
The single most effective way to get more online reviews is simply to ask. It sounds obvious, but most operators don't ask — and the difference in results is dramatic.
Without asking, you'll typically receive reviews from only 1–2% of your customers. That trickle tends to be unrepresentative too — a mix of your most enthusiastic fans and your most frustrated critics, with the vast silent majority of satisfied customers never saying a word publicly.
When you do ask — at the right moment, in the right way — the volume of feedback you collect increases significantly. Not every customer will respond, and some will choose to keep their thoughts private, but even a modest improvement in response rate has a compounding effect on your online reputation over time.
Asking is only half the equation. If leaving a review requires too many steps, even willing customers will abandon the process. The most common approach — including a review link in a post-visit email — consistently underperforms because the link gets lost amongst other content, and copying, opening a new tab, and writing a review from scratch feels like too much effort for most people.
Yonder's Reviews and Survey tool solves this by embedding the rating directly in the email itself — customers can share their feedback with a single tap, without leaving their inbox. For customers who rate you five stars, Yonder then makes it effortless to share that feedback publicly, with a one-click copy button that removes the effort of writing a review from scratch.
The impact of getting this right is tangible. EasyHike, a New Zealand hiking operator, increased their Google reviews by 500% in a single month after implementing Yonder's survey and review request system.
Before Yonder, EasyHike was receiving 2–3 Google reviews per month on average. In February 2021 alone — their first full month using Yonder — they received 15 Google reviews. That's the same customers, the same experiences, and the same satisfaction levels. The only thing that changed was the process for asking and the ease of leaving a review.
EasyHike now has an NPS of 90, with 95% of customers giving five stars. Their raving reviews serve as a constant reminder of what customers value most — and as a powerful conversion tool for new visitors considering booking.
Not every customer needs to be directed to a public review platform. Yonder's intelligent review funnel uses NPS to identify your promoters — those who rate you 9 or 10 out of 10 — and directs only those customers to share their experience publicly on Google, TripAdvisor, Facebook, GetYourGuide, or BookMe.
Customers who rate you lower are routed into a private internal feedback channel instead — giving you the opportunity to address genuine concerns before they become public one-star reviews. This approach protects your reputation while maximising the volume of five-star reviews you collect, and generates up to 5x more reviews than operators relying on a standard post-trip email with a review link.
Once you're collecting reviews at volume, put them to work. Yonder's automated review showcase widget installs a live feed of your latest five-star reviews directly onto your website — pulling from Google, Facebook, GetYourGuide, BookMe, and Yonder direct feedback, and updating automatically as new reviews come in.
Display product-specific reviews on each product page so visitors see feedback from customers who did exactly what they're considering. Show your overall star rating on your homepage. And let Yonder's Reputation Management dashboard bring all your reviews from every platform into one place — so responding to every review, generating AI Smart Summaries, and tracking team mentions never requires jumping between tabs.
Reviews are the end of the customer journey — but the experience that generates them starts long before the visit. Yonder's AI Chatbot answers customer questions instantly on your website, 24/7, helping visitors find the information they need and guiding them toward booking. Yonder's AI Voice Agent answers every phone call in a natural conversational voice around the clock — so no enquiry goes unanswered and no potential booking is lost.
The better the experience from first contact to final booking, the better the reviews you collect. And the more reviews you collect, the more new customers find you and trust you. That's the flywheel — and Yonder powers every stage of it.
Want to see how Yonder can help your tourism business get more reviews, automatically? 👇