The reviews you are losing, and what they are worth
Most activity operators ask for reviews days late, which is the same as not asking. The arithmetic of asking on the evening of the flight.
A passenger who has just landed will write you a review. The same passenger, back at work on Tuesday, will not. Nothing about them changed except the distance from the thing that impressed them.
This is not a marketing observation, it is the whole of it. Every review you do not ask for that evening is gone, and you will never know how many there were.
The arithmetic
Take an operation flying 600 tandems a season.
If you ask every passenger, that evening: in practice you get a written review from roughly one in ten. That is about 60 reviews a year.
If you remember to ask when you think of it — which is what actually happens, on maybe every third day, and only for the passengers still standing in front of you — you get about 12.
The gap is 48 reviews. They cost you nothing except the asking.
Why 48 reviews is a lot
Search results for "paragliding" plus a place name are decided mostly by two things: how many reviews you have and how recent they are. Recency matters more than operators expect — a business with 300 reviews, none from this year, loses to one with 90 that are still arriving.
The click-through difference between the first and third result in a local pack is roughly threefold. Not thirty percent. Threefold.
So the question is not "is 48 reviews worth the trouble". The question is what a tripled share of the direct, commission-free channel is worth. In the season broken down in this article, direct bookings were 42 % of passengers and the single best-paying channel, because nobody took a cut.
Forty-eight messages a year is the best-paid work in the entire business.
Why operators don't do it
Not laziness. Three real reasons:
- The evening is the worst moment. You are packing, driving, eating. It is the one time of day you do not want your phone.
- You don't know who to ask. By eight o'clock you genuinely cannot remember whether the couple from the 10:00 slot were already asked by the pilot.
- Writing the message is friction. Finding your own Google link, typing the same sentence again, getting the passenger's number out of the booking.
Every one of those is a small thing, and together they are why it does not happen.
What actually works
Three rules, in order of importance.
Ask the same evening. Not the next morning. Not "at the end of the week". The window closes fast.
Ask from your own number. A review request from an automated system reads as automated, and people who feel processed do not write about how the flight felt. Send it from the WhatsApp the passenger already has a conversation in.
Make the link one tap. The passenger should not be searching for you. Use the Google "write a review" short link — in your Business Profile, under Ask for reviews — and put it directly in the message.
A message that works, in about the register that gets answered:
Hi Marie — hope the landing wasn't too rough 😄 If you enjoyed it, a couple of sentences here would genuinely help us: [link]. Thanks for flying with us today.
Nothing about five stars. Asking for a specific rating is against Google's policy and, more practically, it makes people not write anything.
Do not do these
- Do not offer anything in return. Discounts for reviews violate Google's policy and can remove every review you have, not just the paid ones.
- Do not ask only the happy ones. Filtering who you ask is also against the policy, and the occasional four-star review is what makes the rest look real.
- Do not batch them. Thirty review requests arriving from one number on a Sunday night is a pattern, and patterns get flagged.
The system that makes it happen
The only version of this that survives a season is one where you are told who to ask, at the hour when it is still worth asking, and the message is already written.
That is what the evening prompt in TandemHQ does: at 19:00 in your own timezone, on days you still have passengers who flew and have not been asked, it lists them. One tap opens your WhatsApp with the text and your link already in it. Five seconds a passenger.
It is a small feature. It is also, measured in euros per minute of effort, the most valuable thing in the app.