Skift Take
Most of the traveler leads that TripAdvisor passes along to online travel agencies and hotels don't come from its hotel metasearch search results pages. They come from the property pages where travelers read reviews and gawk at the photos. This is a huge differentiator from the competition and will afford TripAdvisor a big advantage in the long term.
On the surface -- at least to an outsider -- TripAdvisor CEO Stephen Kaufer is a mild-mannered guy. The online travel review brand's leader is methodical, carefully contemplating each question before providing an answer, and he never raises the decibel level. In public at least.
But when it comes to matters of fake reviews and the reliability of the tens of millions of reviews on his site, there is no quit in Kaufer. He's convinced that his most-important constituency -- travelers -- is satisfied with the perspective they get on TripAdvisor.
As Kaufer puts it, "The system works."
Skift sat down with Kaufer at TripAdvisor's Newton, Massachusetts, headquarters earlier this week, and discussed fake reviews, TripAdvisor's acquisition strategy, the advantages it sees over competitors in hotel metasearch, and the company's roadmap for the future.
A few interesting takeaways from the Skift Q&A below:
It is full-steam ahead for TripAdvisor's user-generated content. Don't expect TripAdvisor to become a hybrid of verified and unverified reviews.
TripAdvisor commends Yelp for cracking down on fake reviews, but believes it has an advantage over Yelp in blocking fake reviews because TripAdvisor is a travel company.
You can expect TripAdvisor to continue with its strategy of buying small startups, as it announced with Oyster this week. Everything, including large acquisitions, is on the table.
TripAdvisor believes it has a significant advantage over other hotel metasearch players such as Kayak and Trivago because of TripAdvisor's hotel reviews, user photos, hotel room tips, and forums.
Consolidating TripAdvisor's myraid apps is on the agenda.
Skift: Let's talk about fake reviews. Yelp admitted that 25% of its reviews never get published because they are fake. And there has been a New York State investigation about fake reviews. Do you find with TripAdvisor that a large percentage are knocked out before they are even published because of your efforts?
Kaufer: We are always improving our algorithms to automatically catch suspicious behavior and launch our investigati
