Restaurant Owner's TripAdvisor How-To Guide: Part 1
iCHEF Club brings the F&B community together by organising free monthly workshops on topics relevant to restaurant owners. At these workshops, restaurant owners learn ways to make their business better but more importantly, have the chance to meet and learn from one another.
In April, we asked ourselves this question: How do you expand your restaurant’s customer base without doing anything drastic? We might have found the answer – tourists!
Singapore sees over 15 million tourists each year (and that number is increasing). Imagine if just a fraction of them came to your restaurant…
So together with TripAdvisor, we organised a session to learn the secrets of attracting tourists to your restaurant. If you didn’t make it, don’t fear. Our team took notes, and here’s what we learned.
How do I get listed on TripAdvisor?
Find and claim your TripAdvisor listing by typing in the name of your establishment. If your restaurant isn’t listed yet, click on “Get listed now” below the search field and follow the instructions.
Verify your identity
Receive access to the Management Centre, which lets you do all sorts of things, like use widgets, respond to reviews and add information and photos.
The secret to ranking #1 on TripAdvisor
There is a formula to having your restaurant rank highly on the list of Singapore restaurants, and it’s a combination of:
The total number of reviews received (the more the better, of course)
Quality of reviews (the rating given by the traveller, especially if they posted photos of the food and the outlet)
The freshness of reviews (more weight is given to the most recent reviews, so that the ranking accurately reflects a restaurant’s current standard. An outlet that was excellent 5 years ago may not be as good today. This evens out the playing field for newer restaurants and ensures that the top ranks aren't dominated by the oldest restaurants.)
So, in a nutshell, collect as many positive reviews as possible, continuously.
How influential is TripAdvisor, really?
Quite, it turns out. TripAdvisor gets about 8.3 million pageviews for Singapore each month. If just 10% of those people are looking for places to eat in Singapore as well (which is pretty likely), over 800,000 people could be looking at your restaurant.
TripAdvisor licenses content to partners like hotel and restaurant booking sites, media websites, and etc, so reviews about your restaurant could appear when someone is searching for accommodation in Singapore, for instance. About 500 million people see TripAdvisor content on other sites every month.
TripAdvisor apps have a “Near Me Now” map that helps travellers to find nearby eateries and browse their reviews. With TripAdvisor’s 5 apps (TripAdvisor, City Guides, Jetsetter, Gate Guru and City Guru) being responsible for 50% of overall traffic, it’s nothing to sneeze at.
According to a TripAdvisor survey, 50% of travellers check reviews before choosing a restaurant; 20% actually read more than 11 reviews to before deciding on a restaurant!
Cheryl Tay is the editor and marketer at iCHEF Singapore. She also manages iCHEF Club, a growing community of F&B owners in Singapore – organising events, an online newsletter and the F&B Entrepreneur Bootcamp, the only regular workshop on opening a new restaurant in the country. In her spare time, she attempts to read every book that’s ever won a literary prize and watches cat videos. Like any proper Singaporean, her love for food runs deep – especially spicy food. Chili is life.
