If you’re a frequent reader, you know I have a fetish about hotel review sites. So when I learned that TravelPost, owned by Kayak, was undergoing a revamp to take on mammoth competitor TripAdvisor, I decided to take a look.
TravelPost now claims to search over 200 websites for hotel reviews, information and rates. My question is, where are they? When I looked at hotel reviews, I saw only 7 websites listed including TravelPost, and 5 sites for rates.
TravelPost says they have over 1.5 million reviews, blogs, and photos. While blogs and photos are important, I’d like to know the number of reviews on their site. I think it’s low and that’s probably why they are importing reviews from other places (though TripAdvisor is excluded). For comparison, TripAdvisor claims to have over 20 million hotel reviews and opinions.
At first glance, TravelPost, which had 350 thousand page-views in February, would not seem like formidable competition for 7 million page-view a month TripAdvisor. Because we are so hungry for choice in this fiercely competitive time, however, it will be interesting to see just how TravelPost fares.
A different approach to reviews.
TravelPost offers the ability to apply many useful filters. You can sort on the reviewer’s age, gender and rating as well as price category, trip purpose and source that provided the review.
What’s up at TripAdvisor
If you haven’t noticed, TripAdvisor also recently made changes including a new search engine that better incorporates airfare information. Not to be outdone, Expedia is attempting to make TripAdvisor their one-stop travel shopping destination.
We are at a competitive point where travel review sites are being rolled into both online travel agencies and online travel resellers. TravelPost give us another place to go to look at reviews in our attempt to ferret out the real from the fraudulent.
Of course this begs the question of how the revised TravelPost site will be handling reviews and their authenticity. That we’ll have to wait and see over time.
Dave (2 years ago)
Although I like kayak and wish TravelPost success, I noticed the maps for hotels isn’t accurate. For example: the Castle Waikiki Grand Hotel is not ocean side on Kalakaua Ave, but rather on on Kapahulu Ave facing the park and Diamond Head. The filters are a welcome idea.
btw, love your site, reviews etc. Follow you on twitter.