Take Control of Your Trip Advisor Listing

With 50 million visitors -- that's 50 million unique visitors -- a month, Trip Advisor is in control of the travel review world right now.  Whether Yelp catches up remains to be seen.  So, I'm going to focus on Trip Advisor for now.

According to an e-mail that TripAdvisor sent to us early this year, Taos' TripAdvisor.com webpage and pages related to Taos received 1.6 million hits in 2010.  That's a lot of traffic for our little town.  

Are you fully optimized to get any business results from this traffic?

First, it's important that you realize that Trip Advisor is not just for reviews of B&B's, hotels and motels.  It has now extended its reach into restaurants, tours, and other attractions that may include ANY business in our area.  Look at the Taos Page, the Taos County Page or the New Mexico Page of TripAdvisor.com to see the many types of businesses being reviewed.

For example, if you look at the Restaurant Listings on any of these pages, you'll see El Meze Restaurant.  It has been consistently ranked #1 locally and either #1 or #2 statewide for some time now.   It is my opinion that this is in part because El Meze has actively promoted the business through Trip Advisor, in particular by encouraging guests to post reviews as they leave the restaurant.

Second, it's important that you realize that Trip Advisor is not your enemy -- even if some of your reviews have been bad, wrong, unfair or just plain stupid.  There are specific ways to deal with bad reviews and I'll discuss that issue in another blog post.  My point here is that Trip Advisor is now an important business tool for you to use with as much or as little time, money and effort as you choose.

As an example, La Posada de Taos has signed up for the subscription add-on that Trip Advisor offers.  On this page alone you will see links into the many ways the site has been restructured in recent years to allow you to control a lot of the information about your company that visitors to their website actually see.

Additionally, Trip Advisor has a plethora of promotional tools that any business can use.  We recommend that you consider signing up for the Business Listing and then pick and choose one or more tools.  We currently offer a promotional package of one type or another on our TripAdvisor listing, always trying to keep interest high for our listing.

Third, there are lesser known features about TripAdvisor.com that have been generating an increasing amount of traffic to Taos, including their Travel Forum and Travel Guide sections.  I strongly encourage all businesses in Taos to get active in these aspects of the Trip Advisor pages -- in particular the Travel Guide pages.  There is outdated information, useless information, self-promotional information and there are many things that need to be written or posted on these pages for the first time.  For example, look at the "Culture" posting for Taos on TripAdvisor.com.  It's terrible!  Well, OK, it's not great.  It needs help from someone in Taos who has the energy and enthusiasm to fix it.

A little over a year ago, a well-known and respected local Innkeeper asked me to assist answering questions on the Trip Advisor Travel Forum.  Over time with lots of posts, I was lucky enough to be designated as a "Destination Expert" on TripAdvisor.  I'll talk more about this issue in another blog post as well, but suffice it to say that before we started answering Forum questions many other so-called experts for New Mexico and Santa Fe were SLAMMING Taos, telling TripAdvisor visitors to New Mexico's Travel Forum that Taos wasn't worth visiting or that it was at most a day trip.  Ouch!

We have just about stopped that nonsense being posted by New Mexico's other Destination Experts, but it's a continuing battle. 

 The last point I'd like to make on this topic is about volume.  Any Destination is ranked in part by the volume of traffic it generates on any given website.   We know Google does this.  It is believed that Trip Advisor uses some Google search results for its rankings.  Google also bases its ranking on the frequency of content updates or upgrades.  Therefore, as a community, we can substantially raise our profile nationally and internationally if we ALL spend 15 to 30 minutes a week posting or tweaking something on the Taos Pages of TripAdvisor.com -- especially the Guide section where so much more is needed. 

 TripAdvisor.com is a Social Networking site.  Larger destinations with more resources than Taos have staff members who do nothing but manage their Social Networking sites such as TripAdvisor.com, Facebook, Twitter, etc.  We're not there yet.  This means that all of us, each of us, every one of us, can help control the future of our Town on that website -- the most important tourism website in the world.  I find it very exciting, personally.

 Good, bad or ugly, Trip Advisor is here to stay and I'm hoping we can all do some work to get this working for ALL of us.  Please help our community by doing the following:

1. Claiming their Google Places Pages and keeping them updated
2. Claiming their TripAdvisor.com listing and keeping it updated
3. Visiting the TripAdvisor Forums and Guide pages and keeping them updated
4. Posting content changes to your websites, your business listing sites and TripAdvisor.com

Trip Advisor Arbitrarily Redraws the Lines of Taos

Taos is a place with a long history and with deep cultural roots extending back into time immemorial.  Those of us who call it home know this and the world knows this, but TripAdvisor.com does not know this.  My previous posts lauded Trip Advisor for how wonderful it can be to promote tourism.  Unfortunately, there's a dark side to their story when it comes to Taos.

If one were to describe Taos, they would have to do so on many levels.  Historical, cultural, political, demographics, geography, climate, and more.  To be sure there is what we all know of as the Town of Taos, but there are all of Taos' additional places that have never been incorporated, but are nontheless a part of the culture, heritage, history and politics of Taos.  El Prado.  Ranchos de Taos.  Arroyo Seco, Arroyo Hondo and more.

When Trip Advisor set up designations for lodgers in what we know of as Taos, they decided that they would use Zip Code designations.  This means that a businesses location on Trip Advisor will be determined by its Zip Code and not by where it actually belongs or where it identifies itself as actually being.  This also means that even if a business belongs to a Professional Association such as the Taos Lodgers Association or the Taos Association of Bed and Breakfast Inns, Trip Advisor will designate its location by its Zip Code.

When you're looking for Trip Advisor reviews and information, do you search by Zip Code?  If not, will you click on something called "Taos County" when there's an adjancent link called "Taos."
It's a shameful thing because it is arbitrary, unfair and harmful.  Visitors to TripAdvisor.com's Taos page will not see businesses that are outside of Taos' Zip Code 87571.  In order to find our peers in El Prado, Ranchos, Arroyo Hondo, Arroyo Seco and more, a visitor to their website must somehow find and click on the "Taos County" page.  This means that visitors are not allowed to find the all of the members of our business community unless they are pretty good researchers.

Compare this to a visit to the "Dallas" page on TripAdvisor.com.  When the page appears, it contains listings for businesses in Grand Prairie, Duncanville, Irving and more.  There is no Dallas County page whatsoever.  These are towns listed on one page, not separated out by Zip Codes, but fully formed cities with populations of greater than 100,000 people each.  Visitors don't have to dig around looking for choices because they're already given to them.   They don't have to look at Dallas County like they would have to do here.

Why the difference, Trip Advisor?

When we spoke to Trip Advisor representatives at the recent Professional Association of Innkeepers International conference in Charleston, SC, they began a circular argument that even they ultimately agreed fell flat.  Here's what they said, then caught themselves:  "Only Zip Codes matter, but in places like Dallas visitors don't know the names of these smaller cities, so we include them in "Dallas," but since it's all about Zip Codes, Taos' lodgers must all identify themselves by Zip Code only, although Dallas is different." 

Huh?

It's not just Dallas.  Look at any TripAdvisor page for any large city and you'll see that they have conveniently included all of the bedroom communities in the city's designation.  Not so here.

What's the harm?  Guests will never see reviews of some of the best B&B's in the Southwest unless they can somehow figure out that TripAdvisor has excluded them from Taos.  Visitors will never see Adobe and Pines Inn, designated as one of the "Best of the Southwest" or the Little Tree Inn, the nation's only true all-adobe Inn.

After repeated attempts by various individual businesses to get Trip Advisor to change this and after being told a variety of things, including "No," it's time to get some of our Professional Associations and public officals involved.  Therefore, I'm asking that if you have the time, to please approach the Taos County Chamber of Commerce, the Taos Lodger's Association, the Taos Association of Bed and Breakfast Inns, the Taos Town Council, the Taos County Commissioners, the Tourism Association of New Mexico, and anyone else you feel may OFFICIALLY present this problem to Trip Advisor.

Write a letter of follow my Forum posts. 

Trip Advisor, LLC
141 Needham St.
Newton, MA 02464

http://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowTopic-g1-i14281-k4177751-l30721587-Incorrect_Geographic_Listings_in_Taos_Area-Owners.html

http://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowTopic-g1-i12104-k4177765-l30715037-Geographic_Designations_of_Properties_in_Taos_New_Mexico-Help_us_make_TripAdvisor_better.html

Our local businesses are being hurt.  It's time to get this fixed.

Introduction to "Notes from the Hinterland"

Portrait of the Blogger

The Hinterland I presently hail from is Taos, New Mexico, USA. A strange place with big beautiful mountains and painterly blue skies unlike anywhere in the world. It is and has been the home to many of the world's most famous artists. It is the "secret" destination of many of our nation's elites. 


New Mexico is "The Land of Enchantment" and the birthplace of "The Bomb." Over on the other side of the Central Mountains and just a short time after the first atomic bomb was tested south of here, the Roswell Incident occurred.  Los Alamos is down the road from Taos. But don't worry, I'm not going to write about space aliens here. I mean, really, they're much more likely to be where you are than where I am.  The Taos Hum might deserve an explanation, but so far as we can tell, an alien origin to the Hum would be a great Science Fiction story.


Far and remote from the coasts are we. No airline hub here. Nope.  California has 5 counties with populations larger than the entire State of New Mexico.  Texas has 2, New York 2 as well.


Since you'd have to drive about two and a half hours to get to Taos from an airport that has more than one airline, you're probably wondering why 2 million visitors make the effort every year.  Put another way:  You have to really understand why Taos is important in order to make the effort to get here. 


La Posada de Taos was the first B&B in Taos and remains one of the oldest continuously operating in the state.  It's a great business and it's an even more wonderful opportunity to live and be present in such an amazingly beautiful home where our doors are open for visitors to enjoy as their home away from home in this incredible place.  If you want to catch a glimpse of what I'm talking about, check out some of my photos on Facebook:  http://www.facebook.com/r.brad.malone?sk=photos.


In 2007, before I became an Innkeeper in Taos, I began this blog as a forum for both storytelling and social commentary.  Although I'd love to have a political discussion with you, it's inappropriate for an Innkeeper to be harsh or opinionated when his guests are more interested in learning about Taos Pueblo than in discussing the federal deficit.  Washington, D.C.?  Where's that?


My days begin sitting down at breakfast with our guests at La Posada de Taos.  Each day our Chef, my partner Michael, prepares something entirely from scratch.  And each day I set plates of gourmet breakfasts down and then join our guests for a shared meal around the dining room table.  It's a magical time for me.  Meeting folks from all over the world and facilitating their interaction with one another as well as with Taos is a gift.


As I've been honing my storytelling skills at the breakfast table, I've been asked to also share some of them on the blogosphere.


Thus, a blog begins anew.  I've retained a few blog posts about interesting things that happened here in New Mexico in the years or months leading up to our arrival in Taos.  It is my intention, however, not to keep the focus on personal stories and to ultimately relay to you some of the quintessential Taos history that will amaze and, hopefully, entertain you.


The English hadn't even come to the East Coast by the time the American Indian and Spanish Colonials had already settled their boundary disputes in New Mexico.  The history of this region can be traced through tales dating back to pre-history and moving forward through the Spanish era that began over 400 years ago to the immigration of Anglos in the mid-1800's, artists at the turn of the 20th Century and then the Hippies of the late 1960's.


Why Taos, New Mexico? It's a fair question. A lot of Americans don't even know where it is. Some folks out here like it that way. New Mexicans revel in being mistaken as being from somewhere else. It's true that some Americans believe that a passport is required to enter or leave the state. Each month New Mexico Magazine prints a column entitled "One of Our 50 is Missing" featuring stories from citizens who have been, for example, denied insurance coverage ("We don't insure persons or property outside the US.") or unable to pass through TSA Security without first giving passport information.


Albuquerque, with over a million people in its metro area, is the most remote large city in America.  Thus, Taos is even more remote.  It's a town of 5000 people that was described in 2009 by culture critic Dave Hickey in this way: 

In the twentieth century, it has probably produced more serious art and literature than any other non-metropolitan area in the United States, and, throughout this century, Taos' virtues have remained more amenable to producers of art than to it's consumers. It has resisted gentrification. . . 

I'll be getting back to Mr. Hickey's observations in a future post, but suffice it to say that there is no other town of 5000 people like Taos.  It is geographically isolated -- surrounded on three sides by the Sangre de Christo Range of the Southern Rockies.  Trains never came to Taos.  The closest Interstate Highway is over 60 miles away.  There is a old-guard of isolationists who fight hard to keep Taos' unique identity and to prevent it from becoming what many perceive as the horror:  an adobe-themed tourist park similar to Santa Fe.


All the photos included on this site are my own.  You can visit me on Facebook both as an individual and through posts on our B&B's website at laposadadetaos.com.


If you want to know more, or if you're going to be visiting Taos, it is my hope that you can use me as a resource.  It's time to get on with it.  See you back soon, I hope.