Trip Reviews

Trip Reviews lets your travelers share what their trip was like after they get back. Their reviews show up right on your trip pages. Future visitors can read honest feedback about the trip, the guides, and the overall experience before they decide to book.

Think of it this way. Say someone is browsing your 5-day Annapurna trek and sees five reviews from past trekkers, all with 4 or 5 stars. That person feels a lot more confident hitting the Book Now button. Reviews build trust. They help new visitors see that your trips deliver what you promise.

A plugin is a small add-on that extends what WordPress can do. The Trip Reviews plugin (also called an add-on) adds the review feature to WP Travel Engine.

What you'll need before you start

Once those are in place, you are ready to set up the review settings.

Setting up the global review settings

These settings control what the review section looks like on all your trip pages. You only need to do this once. It's worth taking a few minutes here because these choices shape what every potential customer sees when they browse your trips.

Show or hide the review section

Two switches at the top let you control what appears on your trip pages:

• Hide Trip Reviews: Turn this on to hide the entire review section on your trip pages. You might use this if you are still collecting reviews and do not want an empty section showing.
• Hide Trip Review Form: Turn this on to hide the form travelers use to write a review. You might use this if you only want to add reviews yourself and do not want travelers submitting their own.

Customizing the review labels

Labels are the words that appear around the review section. Changing them lets you match the tone of your business.

You can change these labels:

• Trip Review Label: The heading shown above the reviews on the trip page.
• Company Trip Label: The label for your company name in the review section.
• Reviewed Tour Label: The label for the trip name in the review section.
• Excellent Review Label: The text shown for 5-star reviews.
• Very Good Review Label: The text shown for 4-star reviews.
• Average Review Label: The text shown for 3-star reviews.
• Poor Review Label: The text shown for 2-star reviews.
• Terrible Review Label: The text shown for 1-star reviews.

Say you run adventure tours and you want the labels to feel more energetic. You could change "Excellent Review Label" to "Unforgettable Experience" and "Very Good Review Label" to "Great Adventure." Your travelers will see those words instead of the defaults.

Showing emoticons instead of stars

Emoticons are small face icons (like smileys) that some people find friendlier than star ratings.

• Show Trip Review Emoticons: Turn this on to show emoticons next to the average rating. This gives the review section a warmer, more casual feel.

Choosing which fields to show or hide

The review form has a few fields travelers can fill in. You can hide any you do not want:

• Hide Experience Date Field: Turn this on to hide the date the traveler took the trip. You might hide this if your trips run year-round and the date does not matter much.
• Hide Gallery Image: Turn this on to hide the photo upload field. Travelers will not be able to add photos to their review.
• Hide Reviewed Tour: Turn this on to hide the link back to the trip in the review section.
• Hide Client Location: Turn this on to hide the field where travelers enter their country or city. You might hide this if you run local day tours and most travelers are from the same area.

Now that the global settings look right, the next step is to start adding reviews.

Adding reviews yourself

Sometimes a traveler emails you a great review instead of submitting it on your site. Or maybe you collected testimonials on a platform like TripAdvisor and want to show them on your trip pages too. You can add those reviews yourself.

What you'll need before you start: have the review text, the traveler's name, and the rating they gave ready to type in.

That is all it takes. The review goes live right away.

Approving reviews from travelers

When travelers submit their own reviews on a trip page, those reviews do not appear right away. They wait for your approval first. This gives you a chance to read through them and make sure they are genuine before they go public.

What you'll need before you start: at least one traveler-submitted review waiting for approval.

Once you approve a review, it shows up on the trip page right away.

How reviews appear on your trip page

After a review is approved, it appears in the Review tab on the trip page. The plugin also calculates an average star rating based on all the approved reviews for that trip.

Say your 3-day jungle trek has four reviews. Three travelers gave it 5 stars and one gave it 4 stars. The review section will show an average rating of 4.75 stars, along with each individual review. That average gives new visitors a quick sense of how past travelers felt.

That is the full setup. Your trip pages now show real reviews from real travelers.