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Save/ShareCalling itself "the most comprehensive hotel information site on the Web," TravelPost relaunched today with the intention of becoming the largest hotel reviews and information site—and displacing TripAdvisor.
The site scours more than 200 websites, such as Yelp, IgoUgo, Yahoo! Travel, and Epinions, to pull more than a million guest reviews from more than 140,000 hotels worldwide.
TravelPost's most impressive trick: Users can filter for reviews to only read those written by persons like themselves. Only want to see the opinions of travelers aged 45 to 60? Click a link, and that's what you'll get. Only want to hear from budget-conscious businesswomen? Filter the search results accordingly. Don't trust the reviews of a particular website? Just blacklist it, and that site's user-generated reviews will be banished from your personal search results. Other hotel metasearch sites can't do that.
TravelPost has all the usual trimmings for a travel website, too, with short descriptions of the hotels, photos of rooms, and Google maps of locations. In a twist, the room rates it quotes are based on a search for prices posted at dozens of online travel websites in the previous 48 hours (on a rolling basis).
TravelPost has a tough slog ahead in trying to dislodge its competitor. TripAdvisor is the most visited hotel and travel community website, with more than 8 million U.S. users each month. (Full disclosure: Budget Travel partnered with TripAdvisor to produce its Best Values 2008 story about the best-rated hotels that charge less than $250 a night.)
The biggest problem facing TravelPost is that it starts off with about one-tenth of the hotel reviews as TripAdvisor. Most individual hotels have fewer than 10 reviews, which isn't enough to convince the typical consumer to make a purchase, according to research by Bazaarvoice, a firm that powers review systems for online retailers.
Out of the gate, TravelPost has some pluses and minuses. It's definitely less cluttered than TripAdvisor—after you use it a couple times, the hotels you're interested in might start showing up much more quickly than they do on TripAdvisor. You don't have to click–click–click through lots of pages first.
On the minus side, TravelPost's formula for calculating an overall rating can sometimes be wildly out of sync with TripAdvisor's overall rating, making one wonder about a hotel's true worth. Take, for example, The Alexander Inn in Philadelphia. At this writing, TravelPost averages the ratings of guest reviews across dozens of websites and gives The Alexander Inn a rank of #45 out of 81 hotels in the city. Meanwhile, TripAdvisor ranks it #3 out of 88 hotels, a big difference. Not every hotel listing I looked at had as large a discrepancy as that, but several did.
Of course, you could argue that TripAdvisor's reviews are the ones that may be questionable, as Arthur Frommer and others have.
TravelPost general manager Ross Weber told me that his site will continue to fine-tune its algorithm for calculating a hotel's overall rating and that it may give additional weight to hotel-review sites that are especially popular or well regarded and to hotels that are heavily searched for.
Another worry about reviews is that, while Travelpost doesn't pay travelers who write reviews (and neither does TripAdvisor), TravelPost does include reviews from sites, such as IgoUgo, Epinions.com, and BedandBreakfast.com, that reward reviewers with cash, frequent flier miles, or chances to win gift cards. Compensating reviewers may make the reviewers biased, according to observers like reporter Dennis Schaal. TravelPost responds that if you distrust any hotel reviewing website for any reason, you can "filter out" that site by clicking to exclude its reviews from your search results.
Many hotel owners say they're excited about TravelPost. Soon, it wlll let them post rebuttals to reviews they don't agree with. It'll also allow them to visit just one website to monitor all of the conversations that are happening about their properties, rather than having to look at dozens of hotel-review sites.
There are a few things we wish both sites would add: We'd like to see a graph of the rates over time at a particular hotel, so that you could see if prices have been rising or falling, just as sites like Farecast and FareCompare have helped travelers detect trends in plane ticket prices. We'd also like to see estimates of surprise fees (resort fees, early checkout fees, self-parking fees) posted next to the hotel rates, the same way TripAdvisor has begun to estimate fees for checked bags and other add-ons with its flight metasearch feature (tripadvisor.com/flights).
UPDATE: March 30: UpTake's co-founder has a detailed analysis of TravelPost and the hotel review industry.
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My guess is that TravelPost's success will come down to their search engine rankings. I use TripAdvisor often, but every time it is from a Google search for some random hotel. Each time I go there because it is at the top of the first page of results.
My personal check for a Priceline purchased "Red Lion Hotel Portland Airport" in Portland OR for an April trip finds TripAdvisor much more updated with four 2009 reviews, with one even mentioning that they stayed via a Priceline purchase, versus TravelPost's newest review from July 2008. The odd thing is despite the what looks like poor reviews for the hotel TravelPost ranks it 58 of 118 versus 65 of 133 on TripAdvisor which is actually a tad stronger of a rank.
Posted By Iolaire McFadden on March 24, 2009, 9:54 AM
I looked at the new site and pretty much it is useless. Lots of old and outdated reviews, much harder to use than TripAdvisor. I do not plan to visit the site.
Posted By Willie on March 24, 2009, 10:44 AM
Sean: Very interesting stuff about the skewed ratings that TripAdvisor and TravelPost give to The Alexander Inn, and likely numerous other hotels.
I will tell you one thing: It's great to see TripAdvisor, a site I value, get some real competition. Kayak/TravelPost have a bunch of smart people working there (TripAdvisor, too, obviously), and I'm sure they will make some inroads.
Hey, more consumer choice. Nothing wrong with that.
I would, however, like to see TravelPost provide more disclosure about the policies of the review sites from which it is aggregating content. How would a consumer be able to make an informed decision about filtering out a site if the consumer doesn't have all of the information about that site's compensation policies for reviewers?
Posted By Dennis Schaal on March 24, 2009, 11:47 AM
I am wondering if some of these facts were checked? UpTake, a start up hotel review and information site (you blogged about at their launch) has 175,000 U.S. accommodations, 600,000 U.S. attractions, from over 5000 websites. UpTake is much more comprehensive than Travelpost based on simple math. How is their 140,000 Worldwide hotels and 200 Websites searched, more comprehensive than UpTake?
Posted By PatriciaJ on March 24, 2009, 12:41 PM
Sean, good balanced post. Congratulations to the TravelPost team for their move forward into hotel metasearch. Its unclear to me why Kayak's Steve Hafner has to go out of his way to gratuitously bash TripAdvisor. Also, his claims of being "unique" and "most comprehensive" are just plain wrong - we've been live with a much larger metasearch product (in part because we licensed TripAdvisor's content) since last May! I posted on these inaccuracies here: http://is.gd/oJdY
Anyway, competition is good for everyone, and again congrats to the TravelPost product people for a nice start!
Posted By Elliott Ng on March 24, 2009, 1:39 PM
Hi Elliott and Patricia,
Thanks for your comments about Uptake, which we've favorably reviewed in the past, as you note.
My post above said that TravelPost claims it is the most comprehensive, which it does. I discussed some of the merits of the site, and I welcome additional feedback from readers for their own thoughts. Different people will define "most comprehensive" differently.
Thanks,
Sean
Posted By Sean on March 24, 2009, 3:10 PM
Thanks Sean. Sorry, didn't mean to jump on you, it is indeed a good post that highlights the difficulty of being a small player in the industry (which we are UpTake know all too well).
I do like the idea of selecting (whitelisting/blacklisting) the review sources that you trust the most. That's something I'd like to add in at UpTake in the future. It reminds me of a comment I had from a Manhattanite that said that they only want to see the verified reviews of other Manhattanites! The Manhattan button would be popular *and* vilified (by all of us bridge and tunnel people who think we know something about travel!).
Posted By Elliott Ng on March 24, 2009, 3:37 PM
Good overview! Did want to clarify one thing regarding BedandBreakfast.com. As is well known, people like to read reviews when planning a trip, but it's always a struggle to get folks to write them when they return home. To encourage this, BedandBreakfast.com has a monthly drawing for a $1000 BedandBreakfast.com Gift Card. Any registered user is eligible, but there is NO link between posting a review (good/bad/indifferent) and winning the gift card.
Posted By Sandy Soule on March 25, 2009, 9:53 AM
Hi Sandy,
Thanks for posting your comment. I didn’t mean to imply that your website is doing anything shady. We like your site a lot. Ditto for the other sites that I mentioned.
Hang in there,
Sean
Posted By Sean on March 25, 2009, 11:28 AM
Just wanted to let you know that we take this subject of influencing reviews very seriously, and have had many internal discussions about what’s acceptable and what’s not. We also hear from innkeepers about how many folks promise to post reviews, but never do – I had this same experience myself in a decade plus of writing guidebooks that depended on reader feedback. Thanks!
Posted By Sandy Soule on March 25, 2009, 12:11 PM
As someone who has stayed at the Alexander Inn on the basis of TripAdvisors ranking, as well as the reviews written by travelers, I can tell you that we were completely happy with this great little historic boutique hotel. Really is a great little place with a perfect location. Easy to walk over to historic Philly, or over to South St. Even walking over to the Italian neighborhood for some great food is pretty easy.
For us, the TripAdvisor recommendations have been very good. We have used them numerous times all over the world and have never been disappointed.
Posted By Darrell on March 26, 2009, 3:59 PM
Although I rely heavily on Tripadvisor for hotel (as well as other travel stuff) reviews I also check other sites as well. Many review sites (as well as print and on-line travel review columnists) sometime seem to have axes to grind.
Posted By Rich on March 26, 2009, 5:37 PM
I started using TripAdvisor many years ago after a particularly ghastly hotel stay. I really wanted to warn others away from an awful place.
Once I started writing reviews on a regular basis, after a few more years, TripAdvisor started sending me travel items as a thank you for being a regular contributor. I've received a T-shirt, a travel pack, a luggage tag, a baseball cap and recently a quart-sized plastic zip-top carry-on cosmetic bag. I appreciate all of the stuff, but you cannot really say that TripAdvisor does not pay for reviews - even though I am blatantly honest in all of my reviews, and I believe most others are, too.
Posted By Mame C on March 27, 2009, 9:51 AM
Hi Sean, great article - and to take skewed ratings a bit further - there are four key ways in which ratings can be dishonest, you can read about them here: ratings and reviews lie
Posted By Charlie Osmond on March 30, 2009, 11:04 AM
As a regular traveler, I usually want to post but don't know where/how. It'd be great for Bed & Breakfast places and non-business travelers to do what Sandy above suggested AND put that on a piece of paper you give guests when leaving with information about the top 2 reviews sites. And, if it is a lot of folks who identify with a niche interest, say they are Latino or gay or Baptist or something, make sure that one of the two review sites is one targeting this community. Best wishes (esp. to the smaller businesses!)
Posted By Regular Traveler on April 6, 2009, 3:29 PM