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TRIPADVISOR HAS BECOME a victim of its own popularity – the sheer weight of reviews on the world’s biggest and most influential travel site has become a turnoff for users.
“I think the wisdom of a crowd is really powerful but at some point it can be a little overwhelming, right?,” Adam Medros, the man in charge of developing new products at TripAdvisor, told TheJournal.ie this week.
“You don’t want to read thousands of reviews … the type of trip that I might want to go on with my family is different to the type of trip you want to go on as a romantic trip.
“For years we’ve been thinking about how to deliver a ‘wisdom-of-friends’ or a ‘just-for-you’ type of experience.”
Medros said TripAdvisor staff had started that process with Facebook integration to show where friends had stayed and their feedback.
“That was a nice first step, but it wasn’t enough,” he said.
‘Deep personalisation’
So the next step, cooked up by the 20-odd engineers in the company’s Dublin office in conjunction with their US colleagues, was to launch the website’s latest feature – predictably called “just for you”.
Based on users’ past reviews and bookings on the website, TripAdvisor will try to come up with the best suggestions for new trips after factoring in the usual price and other preferences.
However, it seems some work still needs to be done on the system with feedback like this on the site’s own forums: “I have just checked out the top 8 just for you suggestion at a destination I know very well and I would never think of booking 8 of them. Seems it is rather flawed just now.”
Medros said “just for you” was only the start of “a lot of deep personalisation” on TripAdvisor.
As well as working on the just-for-you feature, its local staff have also recently been involved in putting together an instant-booking system for the site.
Dublin office growing
TripAdvisor plans to expand the office, which only opened about a year ago, and was on the hunt for skilled developers at the Dublin Web Summit this week to join its Irish contingent.
“It’s about talent – like every other tech company we’re looking for great engineers, great talent, and some of them are here,” Medros said.
Another area the company was in the process of further developing was its mobile app – which recently gained the feature of being able to “download” a city before travelling – while also working to cut down on rogue reviews.
This area has been the source of most of the grief hospitality traders have directed at the site, which has been the target of routine complaints from businesses about false or spiteful reviews. The reach of the website means that its reviews have the power to make or break a business.
But while individual users have been sued for defamation over scathing feedback, for small-time business operators butting up against a firm worth worth $10.6 billion (€8.5 billion) on the New York stock exchange is a harder task.
For his part, Medros was confident both TripAdvisor’s software and its users were doing the job in weeding out false or malicious content.
“Our community is really active in flagging reviews that don’t look right that our investigative team can then look at,” he said.
And then ultimately our technology is really the thing that we are really proud of. We have built a tremendous amount of technology based around how people might try to beat the system and protect against that.
“I feel really confident in the integrity of TripAdvisor content and that it accurately reflects real rankings and real opinions – people wouldn’t come back and use TripAdvisor if it didn’t.”
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Trip advisor serves to remind me there are nut cases that stay at really really nice hotels and complain relentlessly that the check in girl greeted them as Mr Smith instead of Dr, there room had a view that included a road, the beach was too sandy and the first thing they do when they check in is relentlessly photograph every chip, finger print or improperly tucked in sheet corner…
And they think the world is interested and they are important.
True enough, but hence you have average score which most times tells the real picture. Also by reading few reviews it’s kinda easy to tell (dishonest reviews are usually very short with not much detail or written with very bad spelling and grammar). I always use trip advisor before going to new places and never been burnt.
I don’t.
There are other much more reliable guides. Good Food Ireland, McKennas guides, Blue Book etc.
How does it deal with dodgy comments.last place I worked, my boss had every friend in the world posting positive reports but it was all BS.
I only trust ratings that have a very high number of reviews.
Don’t bother with the 5 or 1 star reviews. Read the 4, 3, 2s you’ll get a much rounder view of the pros and cons of a place. Giving a cheap hotel a bad review because it wasn’t a 5 star experience is rediculous. You get what you pay for. Professional or blackmailer complainers are a pox and should be dealt with as such and ignored.
Easily manipulated by business owners and because of this it will never be a true review mechanism. TripAdvisor themselves don’t care about this and are never willing to engage in a meaningful way if you have a complaint about their policies.I speak from experience and would encourage genuine people to interact with the business owners directly if they have a complaint about their experience while visiting a restaurant /hotel or any type of business in the hospitality industry.
TripAdvisor is platform for people who like the sound of their own voices and therefore is not reliable.
Tripadvisor the good
It is a great source when going on holiday.
I use it to see what are the top ten or twenty so places to stay / eat
Then I go on discount sites to see which of them pop up, that are the cheapest. The link with google maps is the business.
Having worked in the industry, Tripadivisor is a better gauge than a lot of these (celebrity critics) where a hotel / restaurant pays the critic money to come wine and dine (better than you or I would be received / treated) and write a piece on the business. Obviously there is a conflict interest here and all too often it’s oversold on the review.
This is one of the reasons why The Michelin Guide is respected and that’s because it has integrity, the restaurant is not made aware of when they will visit and there is no exchange of cash. The only issue with Michelin is that it usually rates the very top end that is very expensive however it can surprise you.
Tripadvisor the dark side
It is well known in the industry that both malicious / false posts are a very real problem, also businesses posting fake positive reviews about their business is an issue.
The company has tried to offset this by giving more points to reviewers who have greater number of reviews, basically if I write a bad or fantastic review and it is my first / third then it does not have the effect /impact that a review by a person who has seventy reviews.
There is a lot of good about tripadvisor and a lot needs to be done getting rid of the trolls.
Tripadvisor is really helpful. I check places out in advance and use the report as an average.
When I go somewhere I give a fair report and praise/credit where it’s due.
If the place is a dive then I say that as well.
At the end of the day day, it`s all about hits on your website generating more advertising revenue, that`s the bottom line for Trip Advisor
Everyone who`s ever stayed in a hotel fancies themselves as a reviewer, they all become Francis Brennan.
This website has zero credibility because it is used as an advertising ploy by restaurant and hotel owners.
On the other hand vexatious disgruntled guests or people looking for a refund take out their anger on the owners.
I put reviews on Tripadvisor all the time. All my reviews are totally honest and tell it exactly as I find it. I think these reviews are absolutely invaluable when travelling anywhere. Some Hotels, in particular in Ireland, in my experience, can sometimes have a different opinion of themselves than what is found there.
At times some of the 4 and 5 star Hotels are, lets just say, liberal with their claims, when some of the 3 star are even better than they claim.
I much prefer a very good and honest 3 or 4 star than a poor 5 star, and I’ve seen some of those too. (read my reviews).
Ah great – another tax-dodger.
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