San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
GOING SOCIAL
TRIPADVISOR’S WEBSITE REDESIGN DEBUTS FACEBOOK-LIKE FEATURES.
If you’re one of the 490 million visitors per month who log in to TripAdvisor to find reviews and book travel, the company just changed the entire site in the hope that you’ll start doing something you didn’t before. Hang around. Maybe even pull up a comfy chair, kick off your shoes and get social with the other folks there. The new TripAdvisor site has adopted a Facebook-like platform, complete with a news feed of people and organizations that you follow, tools for planning a trip by saving specific sites, and the ability to interact with other members and share trip information. And as with Facebook, there’s an emphasis on sharing photos and videos and liking posts.
“If anyone can do a socially powered travel community, it would be TripAdvisor — which has proven it can do user-generated travel content better than anyone,” says Sean O’Neill, travel tech editor for Skift, the online travel news site.
Up to this point TripAdvisor, widely considered the largest travel site in the world, has been a warehouse with a catalog of 702 million reviews, opinions and photos “covering 8 million accommodations, airlines, experiences, and restaurants,” according to the company. The idea now is that visitors can get advice from specific friends, experts and tourism organizations.
“Just as you have your go-to site or app for music and shopping, we are making sure TripAdvisor is now your go-to resource for travel,” Stephen Kaufer, company president and CEO, said in a published release. “The new TripAdvisor provides its members with great content from the people, brands and influencers they rely on for travel and in-destination advice before and during their trip.”
But what’s it mean to the traveler?
“If some people are ‘visual learners,’ I think some travelers are ‘social researchers,’ meaning they’ll retain more information and have more fun if they’re researching their trips via a social platform,” O’Neill says. “For travelers, TripAdvisor’s effort seems aimed squarely at the proverbial worker on a lunch break who’s browsing the internet and wants a bit of daydreaming.”
Return visitors to the site (first-time visitors need to register) will find that what once was a generic start page now shows a profile, a news feed and a column of suggestions for other travelers, influencers, publications and organizations to follow. They are prompted to flesh out their profiles, including adding a profile photo, which is associated with your posts, comments, reviews and likes.
The benefit, supposedly, is there’s more information coming at you — stories, videos, articles, photos — whereas before you had to go look for it. (Although make no mistake, TripAdvisor’s bread-and-butter feature of asking where visitors are going first and providing information is still at the top of the site. Traditional users will still be able to find what they want.)
The follower/following relationship started from scratch last week (except for those in the beta testing), so if you don’t follow anyone, the news feed might be a little limited for a while. Not a problem, O’Neill says.
“When TripAdvisor started offering reviews roughly 20 years ago, it also only had pubs and orgs participating,” he says. “But it eventually amassed an astonishing number of people voluntarily writing reviews and uploading photos from their trips.”
Another of the more helpful features is that, once you do choose a place you want information about, the news feed is populated with posts from the members you follow just related to that place, offering deeper opportunity for inspiration than the traditional list of the top restaurants in that area based on reviews.
Among the brands and publishers invited to participate in the beta stage are: Condé Nast Traveler, Eater, GoPro, National Geographic, Thrillist, Time Out and Wine Enthusiast magazine.
During the past decade, there has been no shortage of startups attempting a crowdsourced social platform for travelers, most of which ended up folding. TripAdvisor, however, already is a powerhouse, supposedly expanding its domain, O’Neill says.
“TripAdvisor has a lot more going for it today than those small-time startups did in the past,” he says. “More than 400 million people a month visit TripAdvisor’s sites around the world, so the platform won’t struggle to find eyeballs.”