TripAdvisor Scores Deep Bing Integration, Launches Windows 8.1 App

TripAdvisor puts a nice notch in its belt today with a Bing integration deal that places its results front and center on search results pages. The deal marks the first time that TripAdvisor has lent its Metasearch data, gathered from over 125M reviews across 3.1M locations, to a search engine.

In conjunction with the new Bing integration, TripAdvisor is also launching a new Windows 8.1 app that allows Hotel Price Comparison (what it calls Metasearch), a touch-based interface and dynamic maps that populate rooms, places to see and eat in real time.

The Bing integration is by far the biggest deal for TripAdvisor here, and fits in with its overall efforts to leverage its Metasearch data beyond just its own site. If you’ve seen Bing’s sidebar content before, then you’ll be roughly familiar with how the TripAdvisor data will be presented. If you search for a hotel name and city, for instance, you’re presented with a map of its location and an address and contact details. That’s all fairly standard for Bing. But now, below that, you’ll also get ‘reservations’ and ‘reviews’ sections powered by TripAdvisor. You can blast in dates and smack the ‘find rate’ button to be delivered booking options from the options that TripAdvisor indexes.

The Metasearch infrastructure, which is used by the new Bing integration, was a ‘major undertaking’ for TripAdvisor, involving integrating over 100 different APIs from travel data sources and many partnership deals. Currently, TripAdvisor also powers Yahoo Travel’s hotel search, but the Bing deal will be the first straight up search engine deal. TripAdvisor is also building out a platform that allows independent venues like B&B’s, the incredibly long tail of fragmented inventory that doesn’t have its own APIs, to participate in its Metasearch program.

“At this point, we’ve partnered with over 260 Internet booking engines, or IBEs, representing approximately 200,000 independent properties,” Kaufer said during its Q3 earnings call. “Over 70 IBEs have completed the integration which, as of last week, allows more than 40,000 hoteliers to sign up and start bidding for leads.”



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7 Tips To Make #TripAdvisor Work For Establishment and Not Against It

Make TripAdvisor work for your establishment and not against it with these seven tips.

In March 2012, ComScore revealed that travel sites grew 10% in traffic in March to 69.7 million unique visitors with TripAdvisor firmly in the lead as more travellers research and book their accommodation via the internet. TripAdvisor is the world’s largest travel community with more than 50 million monthly visitors, 20 million members and over 60 million reviews and opinions. Here are seven TripAdvisor tips to help you optimise your listing.

TripAdvisor tips #1: Claim your listing

By signing up for a free business account, you can receive email notification of new reviews and respond to these reviews, with your reply appearing directly under the post. You can also update your business page with photos and videos, track your performance on the site using the TripAdvisor Management Dashboard (see below) and promote your hotel with free widgets and badges provided by the reviews site.

TripAdvisor tips #2: Encourage hotel visitors to write positive reviews

Hoteliers can ask satisfied visitors to write reviews on TripAdvisor. The more recent and positive reviews an accommodation provider receives, the higher their ranking will be on the site. While TripAdvisor encourages hotels to ask guests to write a review (which is within their ethical guidelines), hotels are not allowed to give customers incentives such as a free night’s stay or room upgrades to write reviews for the site.

TripAdvisor tips #3: Respond to bad and negative reviews promptly

TripAdvisor has put guidelines together on their website on ‘Submitting a management response’. The reviews site encourages hoteliers to address negative reviews; often how a property reacts to the criticism is more important to prospective guests than the negative comments themselves. Your reply should be prompt, professional and polite. If you have legitimately made a mistake, admit to it and be seen to make amends.

TripAdvisor tips #4: Make it easy for visitors to post reviews

The site provides links on every hotel owner’s page that can be added to post-stay guest emails so that hoteliers can ask their recent guests to submit a review – the link makes it easy for the guest to submit a review. In addition, on the owners’ pages are new ‘write-a-review widgets’ that can be added to a hotel’s website in minutes, so that visitors can write a review without searching TripAdvisor for the right page.

TripAdvisor tips #5: Show your website is trustworthy

Travellers want to book hotels they feel are trustworthy, transparent and honest. TripAdvisor offers a variety of customisable widgets that allow properties to display review data and live review feeds on their website. There are also ‘recommended on TripAdvisor’ badges for sites as well. According to the TripAdvisor site, more than 5,000 hotels worldwide have done this and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.

TripAdvisor tips #6: Monitor your TripAdvisor performance

The TripAdvisor Management Dashboard is the free web analytics program available for free to all registered business representatives when you claim your listing. Businesses are given important metrics which they can use to track their performance on the site to make informed and educated decisions regarding their listing. Hotels can upgrade to a premium Business Listing to enhance the dashboard’s features.

TripAdvisor tips #7: Offer great customer service

At the end of the day, impeccable customer service will rarely receive bad reviews. By looking after your visitors and responding to direct enquiries, complaints and suggestions as quickly as possible, this will help head off bad reviews before they reach the internet. If your property keeps receiving bad reviews, evaluate the feedback you are given on the site and take appropriate measures to improve problem areas within your establishment.

Done well, TripAdvisor can be a strong sales tool for driving online sales. Social media is not going away; in fact it is growing in relevancy and important as a research tool for consumers in influencing their travel decisions. If you are managing a hotel, bed and breakfast or motel and would like more TripAdvisor tips and information on how to monitor your online reputation, contact our consultants at Hotel Website Designer today.

This entry was posted in Hotel Internet Marketing. 

INFOGRAPHIC: Vacationing The Social Media Way

By Shea Bennett at Media Bistro:
Did you know that 52 percent of travelers use social media for summer vacation inspiration?
Mobile devices are quickly becoming portable, pocket travel agents, offering instant access to airfare prices, contact information, flight schedules and bookings. Facebook is the traveler’s social network of choice, with 29 percent using this platform for holiday inspiration, ahead of Twitter (6 percent) and Pinterest (4 percent).

This, and more social vacation data, can be seen in the infographic below, which comes courtesy of MDG Advertising.

TripAdvisor Aims To Beat Yelp With “Local Picks” Facebook App

By Josh Constine at TechCrunch:  
Tourists rave about a city’s well-known restaurants and distort their review averages. So today travel site TripAdvisor starts highlighting beloved eateries from people who live nearby in Local Picks, a Facebook app it’s relaunching. Originally released in 2007 but shut down from 2010 until now, Local Picks pulls in reviews of 850,000 restaurants from TripAdvisor, re-sorts them to more heavily weight the opinions of actual locals, and auto-shares your reviews to your Facebook Timeline.

TripAdvisor hopes to mine the virality bonanza of Facebook Open Graph to beat Yelp, which has yet to implement the auto-sharing feature that’s helped other apps boost growth. In a video interview with the public company’s CEO embedded below, TripAdvisor’s Stephen Kaufer tells me Yelp “doesn’t in my view address the social aspect of where your friends’ favorite restaurants are.”



Both TripAdvisor and Yelp are Facebook Instant Personalization partners, allowing the websites to use vistors’ Facebook data and social graph to improve content relevance instantly without a separate authorization. But TripAdvisor’s VP of Global Product Adam Medros tells me “people just don’t what to leave the Facebook chrome to go to another site, and their comfort level with some social elements is different.”

TripAdvisor hopes Local Picks’ algorithm that favors review by people who live near a restaurant will make the Facebook app worth visiting in addition to the main website. In its first three-year run, Local Picks hit nearly one million users, but TripAdvisor shut it down presumably to focus on making its primary website more social. Travel is inherently social after all, judging by the tourist destinations that dominate the list of most checked-in landmarks that Facebook just released.

But with its recent TripAdvisor update featuring friends of friends reviews squared away, it was time to revisit the Facebook canvas and resurrect Local Picks. Today the Facebook app becomes available in English on the web, with more languages and a mobile app coming soon. Medros tells me “Within the chrome, social is 100% natural” so Local Picks, which lives entirely within Facebook, gets people sharing more.



That’s definitely true thanks to Local Picks’ Open Graph Timeline integration which auto-shares when you post a review. That includes its clever onboarding flow that asks you to give a one-to-five star (or bubble in this case) rating and check off your favorite restaurant types. This lets the app show you Mexican restaurants instead of French ones if you’re a burrito lover.
Unfortunately, Local Picks crosses the spam line with an “Invite” button that pre-fills a Facebook request to check out the app with 50 random friends. I grill Kaufer over this in the interview and he says TripAdvisor be watching the data to see if people hate this growth tactic as much as I do.

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