Articles tagged “ugc”

The best user forum in travel has always battled with trolls. This time, its parent company's own sins are forcing it to take drastic actions where some careful pruning would do.

Marriott is fine to go its own way, but while they're worried about the influence of the one negative comment among 20, it's forgetting the reassuring power that 19 real people can have on a potential customer's decision making process.

Hotel and restaurant owners may smell an opportunity here to attack false claims rather than complain about negative opinions.

With their verified reviews, Cruiseline.com and HotelMe have laid down a challenge for TripAdvisor. There is little reason for TripAdvisor to maintain an either-or stance in its preference for reviews that aren't verified, and perhaps TripAdvisor will entertain some changes.

Reading between the lines, Kaufer is saying that TripAdvisor will continue to be a great source of leads for travel advertisers despite Priceline's pending acquisition of Kayak, and that TripAdvisor's scale makes competitors interesting, but a relative non-issue.

Hotels in the economy segment have more at risk on user review sites, but would be wise to leverage the information found on the sites to address specific failures.

Verified reviews are one thing, but when user-review sites make claims about their services, they'd better be sure they can corroborate their boasts.

We're still waiting to see what Google will do with Frommer's, but Google's acquisition of Zagat hasn't stymied Yelp's growth.

Yelp will need to get some momentum going outside of New York and San Francisco if it hopes to fend off the growing local review threat coming out of the Googleplex.

Public shaming of businesses that gin up reviews in their favor is a good idea for consumers, but it will likely begin another battle with merchants who accuse the listings guide of bias.