PHOTO: Paul Wiseman of Trafalgar. (Courtesy of Trafalgar)

One of the biggest news developments to come to come out of Trafalgar this year is its decision to contract with the Feefo, a global ratings and reviews firm, to provide uncurated and unedited customer reviews on the tour operator’s website. To date, 13,000 reviews are now live on the site. We sat down with Paul Wiseman, Trafalgar’s president, to discuss the growing importance of unedited and uncurated reviews into today’s tech-savvy world.

How big a decision was it for Trafalgar to begin publishing uncurated and unedited reviews?

One of the biggest news pieces for us as a brand [in terms of our] constant evolution is that we’ve realized the world has changed. We’ve realized that virtually no customer buys anything these days without seeing a customer review. It was a big decision for a company like us to do that and publish it.

Why is it important that the reviews are unedited and uncurated?

The reality is that the reviews won’t be useful unless they’re honest, and honest reviews are going to have some [elements of] negativity… So we are absolutely opening that up for the world to see.

It opens an entirely new communication channel. You have to resource that communication channel. And it’s not unsubstantial. There’s a heck of a lot of benefits if you do it right, and a lot of downside if you do it wrong, which is why our understanding at the moment is almost nobody else is doing it. When you look at the travel space and look at live, unedited, uncurated reviews, you’ll find very few companies that are doing it.

It wasn’t the hotels’ choice to have Trip Advisor come along. But it’s certainly is our choice to empower our customers to see what everybody is saying about our product.

How does the process work?

We do our internal reviews, but the ones published on the site are through a third party that processes them. The company sends them an email. We have nothing to do with it.

Every itinerary has its reviews and all the reviews are pooled together, so every single trip has got everything right there.

The customer reviews the trip and it’s posted on the website. These are past guests, and to verify them they have to have a booking number. So these are real reviews.

One of the controversies about Trip Advisor is, for example, they recently had 8,000 reviews of a restaurant in Italy that didn’t exist, because there’s no customer verification.

Now [our reviews] are customer verified, we’re not touching them. They are fully uncurated and unedited and it’s all up there. It’s a big change for us.

Have you been able to learn anything by posting the customer reviews?

The reality is the majority of our travelers travel between April and October. So for the reviews to be up there in big numbers it has to be during that period. And then everybody books from October to April. So we’ll see the full effect during the booking season.

But as of today, some of our products are up 150 percent. And the forward bookings look very positive overall. So we have momentum right now. How much of it is a strong dollar… or a desire to go to Europe or how much is due to Trafalgar reviews is difficult to ascertain. But currently the reviews are a very positive contributor.

What we’re encouraging the agent to do is to share the reviews with their clients. To help them close the sale. That’s the whole point