London - Gone are those days when we sat in a stuffy travel agent’s on a Saturday afternoon looking at brochures: the world of travel has changed for good.
Planning and booking a holiday can now be done from a mobile phone. We can now rate hotels, restaurants and attractions, then leave comments and reviews about our good – or not so good experiences.
Of course this also means we have a wealth of travellers’ opinions to reflect on in the form of thousands of reviews.
As TripAdvisor celebrates 15 years in the business – are we less adventurous because of pre-reading this information before travelling?
No, says Barbara Messing, TripAdvisor’s chief marketing officer: “Some people can be anxious when planning a trip and the reviews help inform them and make them feel more confident.”
Staff can’t post positive reviews of their own hotels; the site has special management that prevents bias and fake reviews. Every review goes through a tracking system, where specialists investigate every review that is flagged for inspection by the system, and act on any reports they get from our community.
According to spokesperson James Kay, “Because we have been tracking reviews for more than a decade we can spot what is normal reviewer behaviour and what is not.”
So what happens when a hotel sees a bad review from a user?
“We believe in transparency and owners and managers have the responsibility to reply to such comments,” says Messing.
The amount of information now available at our fingertips allows us to make decisions on the go, as opposed to walking round with a guidebook or relying on out-dated information. This system has also influenced the way the travel industry works. Messing says: “There is no other resource to give real reviews on your trip.”
Companies are more accessible, allowing for a much more global profile. TripAdvisor has an online community of its own, and this user-generated content is what consumers often value more than the information provided by businesses themselves.
In 2000, there were 677 million international tourist arrivals, by 2012 that number had grown to over 1 billion.
In 15 years the world’s largest travel site has raked in more than 200 million reviews. Maria is the longest serving member of the TripAdvisor community, having joined in 2002. There are more restaurants (2.4 million) listed than hotels (915 000). The majority of traffic comes from outside the US.
The first TripAdvisor traveller review was of Captain’s House Inn in Chatham, Massachusetts, which earned a rating of 4 bubbles. Since then, the number of reviews and opinions has accelerated, up 2 000 percent in the past 10 years, and up 60 percent since last year.
Personalisation will play a key role in how we travel, says
Adam Medros, vice-president of Global Products: “The potential to give tailored results is huge. If smartly done and intuitive, it will feel less like a service and more like a companion.”
The Independent