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| Peer Review Travel Websites https://forum.costaricaticas.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=12378 |
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| Author: | Witling [ Tue Jun 27, 2006 4:42 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Peer Review Travel Websites |
Let Your Fellow Travelers Be Your Guide Welcome to the power of "peer reviews". In the old days I would whip out my AAA tour book or another travel guide to read hotel descriptions written by professional reviewers. But those rating and ranking systems may not have uncovered the air conditioning problem experienced by a fellow traveler who had stayed in that hotel only one week prior to my arrival. Peer review sites are rapidly changing the travel booking process. I always read reviews of computer software, refrigerators, or digital cameras, written by people like me, before I buy. So why not travel? Websites that specialize in peer reviews, like Trip Advisor, My Travel Guide, and IGoUGo, are rapidly growing in number. Almost every online travel agency, like Expedia, Orbitz, and Travelocity, have incorporated peer reviews into their hotel booking modules. And even the well known travel guidebooks, like Fodors, have jumped on the peer review bandwagon and added amateur reviews to their websites alongside the professional reviews they have published for years. Although many travel sites, such as Cheaptickets or Yahoo Travel, use the same peer reviews found on other sites (in this case, Orbitz and Travelocity respectively), I found more than a dozen unique peer review databases on the Web and there are probably more out there now and new ones starting all the time. For a major conference hotel, like the Radisson Plaza Lord Baltimore in Maryland, I found more than 500 unique peer reviews scattered across a dozen or more sites. Some reviews were as recent as only a few days before my intended stay. Peer review sites should be judged on their depth, breadth and currency. In my non-scientific survey of hotels in Baltimore, the majority of peer review sites offered reviews for most or all of the eight hotels under consideration in the Inner Harbor neighborhood. But the number of reviews accessible varied widely from site to site. Peer reviews are not limited to big city hotels. In the small town of Bend, Oregon, where I will be headed next month to a family reunion, almost every peer review site covered at least several hotels, with Trip Advisor leading the way with reviews of 22 area hotels, Travelocity (15), Orbitz (14), and TravelPost, with reviews for 13 local properties. Perhaps the most well known peer review travel site is Trip Advisor, which covers 164,000 hotels in 24,000 destinations, according to Christine Petersen, senior vice president, marketing. Petersen says that Trip Advisor has almost five million reviews and receives more than 18 million visitors per month. "We're posting more than a hotel review every minute," she told me. Trip Advisor ranks 14th in usage among all travel sites and 2nd within the destinations and accommodations category according to Hitwise, a firm that tracks travel website usage. Some travel sites, such as the comparison-shopping site Kayak, don't post their own reviews, but provide links to other sites with both professional and peer reviews. Orbitz includes their own peer reviews but also provides links to Frommers for professional reviews if they exist. While travel sites probably account for the bulk of peer reviews, general merchandise sites, like Epinions, are moving into the travel space offering hotel reviews alongside their peer reviews of televisions, toasters, and tennis rackets. The currency of peer reviews can be vitally important. In my Baltimore hotel search I eliminated the Hyatt Regency after reading numerous unfavorable reviews that described a hotel renovation in process. Time-critical information of this nature could not be gleaned from any printed guidebook. This raises concern of peer review accuracy after a renovation is complete or another complaint has been addressed. Expedia keeps only the most recent 25 reviews online. Travelocity removes reviews after one year. Trip Advisor does not remove reviews, but allows hoteliers to post a response, such as what happened recently at the Radisson Edwardian Mountbatten Hotel in London when a number of guests reported mouse sightings in their hotel rooms. The hotel manager posted a reply saying "We did have a few sightings as a result of recent road work in the area." He assured Trip Advisor readers that his in-house team has since dealt with the critters "very effectively." Monitoring these growing peer review sites is a real challenge for many hoteliers, but "Feedback is a gift," says Del Ross, vice president of America's distribution marketing for InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG). With peer reviews on the rise, IHG is exploring an automated system to monitor these sites and is considering adding its own peer review section to the IHG website. Some hoteliers are concerned that an unscrupulous competitor could sabotage their business by posting an erroneous, malicious review. To minimize this threat, some peer review sites, like Priceline, only allow travelers to write a review if they have booked on Priceline and stayed in that hotel. But My Travel Guide, which is also owned by Priceline, allows anyone to write a review with no validation of their stay. Trip Advisor depends on the community to police their site. "After a review is posted we've got these eighteen million visitors who weigh in and they are very vocal if they see something that doesn't seem right," says Michele R. Perry, director, communications. Some peer review sites are trying to differentiate themselves by segmenting reviewers into categories. For example, a recent TravelPost review was written by a 48 year old woman on a business trip with a moderate travel budget, who spent four nights in that hotel. In another review, Travelocity lists the reviewer's favorite vacation destination as "Europe" and states that the user rated this hotel as being good for families, honeymoon/romance, business, active/adventure, couples, and singles. Another reviewer on IgoUgo actually displayed her photo, her age range, her home town, the number of reviews she has written, her contact information, and a personal statement saying "I've traveled since the age of five weeks. My suitcases get restless if I don't have a trip in plan and a ticket at hand." Peer reviews in the travel industry are not limited to hotels. A British website called Skytrax allows travelers to review and rank airlines, airports, airplane seats, and meals. Luckily I've never had to fly on one of the two airlines that earned only one star out of five, but I sure wish I had read the unhappy reviews about the business class seats on the Air France 777-200 before I cashed in my Skyteam miles for that trip to Paris. See the article for links to the highlighted websites: http://www.usatoday.com/travel/columnis ... sman_x.htm |
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