In today’s digital landscape, authentic customer voices drive more bookings than any marketing campaign. User-generated content (UGC) has evolved from a nice-to-have into an essential sales driver. When travellers share their real experiences, through photos, stories, and reviews, they create trust that no brand message can replicate.

However, most UK travel businesses rely on third-party review sites like Trustpilot and Feefo to send emails to their customers, primarily to gather brand-level booking review scores, and just leave customers to post hotel-level reviews on TripAdvisor, who then try to switch sell customers via their price comparison engine to other brands.

This is just madness and shows how many businesses are ignoring their Superpower: the best advocates they will ever have for their brand are customers who have travelled with them and had a good holiday.

Research indicates that if a business does not request reviews, less than 20% of customers voluntarily leave one, but when asked for feedback, 80% respond.

So, the most important thing is just asking!

However, too many travel businesses focus solely on their brand reputation, even when they have 25,000 positive reviews and a 4.6/5 rating. What’s the point? Do you really think another few hundred reviews will change anything?

At the same time, these businesses aren’t even asking their customers how their holiday went, opting for the lazy approach of using TripAdvisor review scores on their websites to reflect supposed hotel quality, rather than engaging with their own customers.

This has the benefit of demonstrating a certain level of independence and a review system, as TripAdvisor has been operating for quite some time, but it’s time for these scale travel businesses to start collecting and taking their own customers’ views more seriously.

I have therefore made developing tools to gather reviews as one of the main focuses of my Travel Voice business.

Our new “Review Talk” tool creates an ultra-personalised “AI Voice Review Interviewer” for every booking, pre-programmed with the customer’s name, party type and booking details.

Knowing the hotel name and location allows review agents to research the hotel’s facilities and nearby bars and restaurants, enabling an informed, two-way conversation with the holiday maker leaving the review.

Also, we all know that the weather is a key factor in holiday enjoyment. Knowing the travel dates and hotel location allows the Review Interviewer to understand the weather for each day of the holiday, so they can ask contextualised questions about what customers did on rainy days, for example.

This high degree of personalisation, combined with the simplicity of leaving views via a chat to a Voice Interview, increases the average amount of content gathered compared to written reviews by a factor of 5.

This content is then used to drive “Digital Word of Mouth” with AI used to craft well-written reviews pre-seeded with the holiday company’s name and formatted for all major review sites such as Tripadvisor, Trustpilot, and Google, with deep links so that once a customer has approved the created review, they can post it on behalf of the business.

The aim is to ensure that the brand name is visible throughout the “Trusted” sites such as Tripadvisor, which large language model search engines like Gemini and ChatGPT use when responding to customer queries, for example, “What are the top 5 All-inclusive hotels based on review scores?” The AI search provides links to Tripadvisor’s page for this hotel, and as customers scroll down, they repeatedly see the brand name of a travel business used by a customer to book that hotel through our brand-seeded reviews.

These same reviews can be used on the travel companies’ sites to provide detailed guidance to future customers and to drive fresh SEO content at a hotel level, further boosting site visibility.

Ironically, we call this product “Review Light”!

To find out how we are taking this ten times further, businesses will need to sign up for a meeting, as some ideas are simply too good to share publicly with competitors.