TripAdvisor Poised For Success
Written by Ryan Carrigg (contact - e-mail) -- July 3rd, 2008 |
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TripAdvisor.com, the largest travel community on the web and one of the hottest sites within the travel category, has shown impressive growth after a 2008 site redesign. Like most travel-related sites, TripAdvisor.com experienced a lull in activity in the winter months of 2007. However, since January 2008 an average of 6.6 million US unique visitors have viewed the pages of TripAdvisor. In May 2008 TripAdvisor’s US audience was 7 million unique visitors, 34% higher than the level recorded in May 2007.
Many travelers use TripAdvisor for its consumer-generated reviews in order to get an unbiased feel for a hotel or vacation spot. As such, it is important that a consistent flow of reviews are posted so that content remains relevant and up to date. Over the past year an average of 1% of visitors added a review, a significant volume for such a large site.
TripAdvisor.com is a growing site that has managed to harness the valuable opinions of its users. As online travel researchers become more and more savvy, utilizing the expertise and feedback from peers becomes more and more attractive. As such, TripAdvisor and other consumer-generated review sites are poised for continued success.
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July 3rd, 2008 at 1:49 pm
While Tripadvisor is doing well statistically, they have some serious issues of concern to consumers. That puts them at risk for future growth and opens opportunities for significant competition.
1. Tripadvisor is owned by Expedia. This is an inherent conflict of interest, since it is now a marketing tool for them.
2. Trusworthiness of reviews. It takes quite a lot of experience to be able to sort through the reviews and discern the “real” ones from the “fake” ones. I’ve given this a lot of thought and have written about it extensively on my website at http://beatofhawaii.com. Just search for Tripadvisor and you’ll see.
Aloha, Jeff
July 3rd, 2008 at 2:18 pm
Aloha Jeff!
1) TripAdvisor is indeed owned by Expedia, but is operationally quite separate. Expedia Inc is headquartered in Seattle and TripAdvisor is over in Boston. Compete’s data shows that while Expedia advertises/markets heavily on TripAdvisor, so do all of the other major online travel agencies and hundreds of other advertisers. While it’s something to keep an eye on, we don’t perceive there to be any conflicts of interest right now.
2) Sure, but this is not a TripAdvisor-specific problem. Any website with consumer generated content faces the same issues, and collectively as Internet marketers we’ll need to find ways to improve the quality and trustworthiness of content like this. In the meantime, 7 million users do appear to be finding something worth going back for, so it can’t all be bad!
Greg
July 3rd, 2008 at 8:52 pm
Trip Advisor is a great site and continues to improve year by year. We agree with you — it’s definitely poised for success and your rebuttals to the comments above are absolutely correct.
July 4th, 2008 at 12:55 am
Well, they certainly are getting bigger. TripAdvisor just bought VirtualTourist, which increases their reach in terms of an audience for UGC some more. You’re right that so far, they’re not all that bad, and the reviews are reasonably trustworthy, minor incidents notwithstanding. But kinda worries me a bit, cause they seem to be developing a bit of a monopoly on user supplied hotel reviews.
July 5th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
I was just down in Samara Costa Rica two weeks ago. While talking with a land developer she told me of a situation with the TripAdvisor forum where a competing developer, under a fake name, is trashing her company. She had wanted to know if there was anything to do about it.
This seems to me to be the concern that needs addressing by TripAdvisor.com. How can they handle growth if credibility issues like this pop up? A real world example from little old me. Now, I know how I’d handle this, but the tactic isn’t something I would recommend to a business owner.
July 7th, 2008 at 1:52 am
Great information for my comparisons with some of the MLM - Network Marketing travel companies and their offerings. Thanks for great highlight on Tripadvisor
Rod Cook
http://www.mlmwatchdog.com
July 7th, 2008 at 7:09 am
When I look at tripadvisor I see a huge billboard focused on making the money. Go to the homepage and type in your city, takes you to the next page and see that the city info is below the fold. Hmmm if that doesn’t say Show Me The Money!!! I don’t know what does.
My site wants to offer the same service as TA but focus on the little guys more. I’m shooting for a 2010 completion, well it’s never really going to be complete but I hope the site as a whole is more filled in and ready to compete….
VacationRanking.com remember the name for 2010
July 9th, 2008 at 9:32 am
You would be amazed at the power of tripadvisor for smaller agencies also. Each post by a customer on tripadvisor that mentions an agent/agency generates anywhere from 5-50 leads/contacts based on the detail of the review and the property reviewed.
It blows away any paid advertising source for generating qualified leads…..though we have definitely seen our clients having more issues in posting agent information since their purchase by expedia……
July 19th, 2008 at 10:59 am
this site is really supervb, no doubt for this graph
August 29th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
By looking the statistics, its a impressive growth in 2008. TripAdvisor.com is becoming more attractive for the viewers after the slight modifications occurred. So it has to perform consistently then it will gain better results.
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Ricky Conway
http://www.hookup-tonite.com
December 9th, 2008 at 3:09 pm
Not only am I skeptical of many of the reviews, each person’s taste and expectations vary wildly.
As an example, the number one rated restaurant in Honolulu is a bakery called Leonards. It’s claim to fame are doughnut holes called malasadas. Granted, they are very tasty, but Leonard’s Bakery is not a restaurant.
Sticking with Honolulu, there is a significant amount of construction and remodeling going on around the Beach Walk area, with the most activity being the Trump Tower, Royal Hawaiian and Sheraton. In my review of a couple of hotels near the construction I mentioned the beep-beep-beep of heavy equipment, the pounding of impact hammers, etc. I suggested people consider booking a hotel away from the area. Two posts were added in short order stating they didn’t notice any noise. If that’s not a bogus post I don’t know what is.
December 26th, 2008 at 2:27 pm
TripAdvisor has credibility problems.
Built-in conflicts of interests btwn Expedia, Hotels.com, etc…
If you are on TripAdvisor be sure that you will be “hearded” like cattle to one of their booking engines…
Better off going to real travel sites like LonelyPlanet or RoughGuides or other “core” travel sites to get your travel info from trusted travel publishers.
TripAdvisor is own and operated by a transaction company “Expedia” and that’s what you get….transactional focus…not an information focus or expertise.
Stay away from TripAdvisor….
December 30th, 2008 at 7:28 am
I agree that Trip Advisor has a huge conflict of interest with regards being owned by Expedia. Another problem area however, is the fact that anybody can leave a comment regarding a hotel even if they haven’t stayed there. I understand that some operators leave negative comments about their competitors and positive comments about themselves. The only authenticity check that Trip Advisor carries out is to check the IP address of the senders computer and the email address. I actually have documented proof of this. This is of course why comments on Trip Advisor vary enormously.
Personally I think Trip Advisor has become a total sham and a waste of time. It was a great idea to start with but it’s now way past its sell by date. My advice is to check out sites where people actually have to stay at the hotel in order to comment e.g bookings.com & laterooms.com
May 9th, 2009 at 8:54 am
Nice growth in statistics and traffic.
May 19th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
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June 11th, 2009 at 10:23 am
TripAdvisor was founded in February 2000 and was purchased by InterActive Corporation in 2004. Original financing was obtained from Flagship Ventures, the Bollard Group and private investors. IAC spun off its travel group of businesses under the Expedia, Inc. name in August 2005
Early in 2005 we received several phone calls from people asking if we did or would pay - directly or indirectly - for posting on discussion forums in support of our business. We replied ABSOLUTELY NOT. Shortly thereafter, the specific forum on TA that concerns our area of the world began pumping up the volume .. there were a series of absolutely out-of-line postings, and, other clearly in defiance behavior. After all these years, there are now ‘Destination Experts’ some of whom celarly had and have ulterior motives.
Too bad the powers that be allowed this to happen. Now that the ‘ringleader’ has succeeded in getting cheerleaders to work for him, he now rarely if ever posts. “They” pretty much post only in support of one company with an occassional nod to someone else.
This activitiy adversely affects legitiamate business since the one company supported by the ‘rah-rah’ group would not be getting the business it does without this.
There are some sincerely informative posters, and could be a tremendous source of good information had TA Corporate not allowed this to go on so long, despite personal phone calls and emails to corporate early on.
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