Did you ever wonder what it needs to double charter request for a bareboat charter yacht? Well, we found out about this and we will let you know in the following article.
We stumbled over an amazing increase in number of charter requests while evaluating the amount of customer reviews. But first the story and than the facts. 4 Years after introducing
YachtCheck as a qualitiy initiatve for the yacht charter market we wanted to know if the efforts of charter operators sampling all those thousands customer reviews are finally paying back.
We analyzed the number of online orders in the
Yacht Charter Reservation System YachtBooker for all yachts in between June 2012 and June 2013. Than we divided the yachts in two primary groups: The first group of 3550 charter boats that had no customer reviews and a second group of 1045 yachts that had at least one customer review. In the graphic below the first group of boats with no reviews is the "zero" reference. The second group of charter yachts that have customer reviews was spilt into 3 sub-groups, 1-10 reviews, 11-20 reviews and 20+ reviews.
Voilà! The yachts having 1 - 10 reviews received 64% more online orders than yachts with no reviews. Boats having 11-20 reviews received 100% more charter requests.
Charter yachts having more than 20 reviews even had more than the double number of online orders than not reviewed boats.
We always presumed that reviews will create trust with users in the web, especially in tourism. But we were not aware of that the amount of reviews could double the number of customer requests. But it makes sense:
A charter yacht that shows 20+ reviews needs a review rate of minimum 80% (considering 20 booking per year with expiring date of reviews of 450 days). A charter yacht that has around 80% of its bookings reviewed seems to appear for customers quite trustful. So there is no need for the customer to hesitate and place his request.
We summarize: The amount of online orders increase significantly with raising numbers of customer reviews. Charter boats having around 80% of their bookings reviewed can receive the double number of orders from online systems than yachts without reviews. This means for the charter operator company it is worth to collect as many customer reviews as possible in order to gain the maximum attention for their charter yachts in the web.
We know that the proper collection of customer reviews is quite some extra work for charter operartors. But you can see - it pays back! Thanks to the charter review invitation function of
YachtSys and the new
YachtCheck iPhone and iPad app, there is no paperwork needed anymore and charter clients can comfortably give their review during the cruise, in the moment of check-out or from their own PC when they are back home.