Oct 20 2009
Tripadvisor Reviews Waning; Search Biz Elusive
Fewer consumers are looking at TripAdvisor reviews (and it’s no surprise to you that I agree).
I have research to back it up. PhocusWright’s online traffic and conversion report has recently been released in conjunction with Compete. While I haven’t seen the study (the report costs $1,200), UK travel analyst Travolution has.
They report from the research that the number of people looking at TripAdvisor reviews has dropped from 55 percent in October 2007, to 46 percent in October 2009.
Why the decrease in TripAdvisor review traffic?
Amidst ongoing concerns about review veracity, consumers are frustrated about TripAdvisor’s over-tuned business model.
Consumers cannot directly link to properties, and it attempts to force people into the Expedia food chain.
For some of us, that’s like a square peg in a round hole, and drives us away from TripAdvisor entirely.
TripAdvisor has not cracked Kayak’s hotel booking and flight search business.
In the highly profitable hotel and air (meta) search business, Kayak reigns king. Between them and their sister site Sidestep, they average 6 million U.S. unique visitors per month (based on Compete statistics).
Under 10 percent use hotel and airline search.
FocusWright indicates 9 percent of TripAdvisor visitors (or about 1 million) in June 2009 used the site’s hotel booking search as opposed to looking at reviews. Only 8.6 percent of visitors tried TripAdvisor’s flight search tool, again indicating only modest interest.
Clearly these minimal conversions are not what Expedia was hoping for in acquiring TripAdvisor.
Three questions remain.
- Can TripAdvisor stay on top of the review business with renewed relevance and without undue marketing pressure from Expedia?
- Is there a way for TripAdvisor to become more effective in the financially critical travel search business?
- Can Kayak, Oyster, or anyone find a way to penetrate TripAdvisor’s travel review business? At this time Kayak’s Travelpost site is getting only 250,000 monthly (unique) visitors.
I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
>Related Posts:
Mahalo for the interesting info. I didn’t realize TripAdvisor’s reviews were waning.
Maybe the Oyster model is better for the consumer when doing their travel research.
This is my personal experience with Tripadvisor and I am going to assume that mine is similar to many:
Ever since I found what I felt was a “real discrepancy” with what Tripadvisor said was THE NO. 1 HOTEL in a town we had planned to visit – meaning a small, well worn hotel was given #1 spot – while another BRAND NEW hotel with flat-screen TV’s, etc. was given a lesser spot in the ratings (I also noticed that the small, worn hotel had 100+ reviews – most of them recent and posted by people who had only posted 1 review (suspicious) – I contacted Tripadvisor asking them to ‘check on this particular property’ – and it miraculously went from #1 to #2 (still much higher in the rankings than it probably deserved).
Needless to say – we booked another property in the town – not #1 or #2 – and we drove by the said properties while we were on vacation and the well worn property was definitely WELL WORN and would NOT have been my #1 pick or anyone elses!! I am SURE their ranking generated business that they did not deserve.
So, basically, I have been using the forums on Tripadvisor – they seem to be legit – but, have stopped using the reviews for a long time now. I think many of the reviews are “plants” and sadly, once a company or a person becomes ’suspect’ – people stop trusting.
When will companies and people learn that they must maintain a customer’s trust first and foremost??? Everything else will follow. Lose that trust and they have an almost impossible task ahead of them – trying to rebuild said trust.
[...] we wrote about recently, Kayak competitor Expedia, still finds conversion from TripAdvisor to hotel search an illusive [...]