By Sam Shank, CEO of Dealbase.com
Travelers love reading hotel reviews and TripAdvisor has become the largest online travel media company by virtue of their monopoly control of the hotel review category. But they face their first serious threat in years with Kayak’s relaunch of TravelPost.com, a site I originally founded in 2004 and sold in 2006.
Based on what I’ve heard, the next few weeks will be very entertaining as Kayak escalates their criticism of TripAdvisor into an all out war. I’ve also heard that these critiques are striking a chord within the TripAdvisor leadership. Perhaps the sluggish financial performance of their parent company Expedia Inc. is limiting the ability of TripAdvisor to materially respond to Kayak’s allegations (of over-commercialization, for example)?
Kayak hopes to dethrone TripAdvsor
I recently posted on the DealBase.com blog some thoughts on the opportunities and challenges Kayak has as they work to dethrone TripAdvisor. Here’s a recap and my recommendations for Kayak:
• To build a credible hotel-review destination site, Kayak must dramatically increase the number of originally posted reviews.
• This task will be exceedingly difficult due to the network-effects of the hotel review business that TripAdvisor possesses (“I want to post reviews where the most readers are, and I want to read reviews where the most posted reviews are”).
• Kayak has some unique strengths (a large audience of early-adopters, one of the best web development teams in the world) but to break the TripAdvisor monopoly, they’ll need to exploit TripAdvisor’s vulnerabilities.
• These tactics include paying travelers to write reviews (via a revenue share of ads that appear on their reviews), integrating with TripAdvisor’s competitors and major social networks to get new reviews, expanding to reviews of flights, and deeper integration with the core Kayak service.
A different analysis is that, through review aggregation and normalization on a massive level, Kayak’s motivation is to commoditize the hotel review category, and thus diminish the value of the TripAdvisor monopoly to the point where it’s irrelevant. If the place you post a review isn’t where the reviews are viewed, then there’s no advantage to posting on any particular service. Perhaps this is why Yelp does not participate in review aggregators unless it gets prominent placement – they don’t want to be seen as a commodity.
You can read the original posts about the strengths and weaknesses of TripAdvisor vs. Kayak + TravelPost.com and tactics that Kayak can use to dethrone TripAdvisor.
Sam Shank is co-founder and CEO of the hotel deals site DealBase.com, where he finds it interesting that interest in Las Vegas hotel deals is more than four-times higher than interest in the next most popular destination (New York City hotel deals).
Related posts:
Review of Hotel Metasearch Review Sites
Travel Metasearch is done! Long Live TravelMetasearch!
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3 Responses
Sam: As you describe, Kayak will have its work cut out for it trying to dislodge TripAdvisor’s hold on user-generated hotel reviews through Kayak’s relaunched TravelPost.com. Granted, as you said, Kayak has a tremendous team over there. But, I think your recommendation that Kayak should offer repeat-reviewers a revenue share on ads posted alongside their reviews is ill-advised, to say the least. Hotel-review sites like TripAdvisor, which I find very valuable when doing research, constantly are being slammed with the criticism that a lot of their reviews are planted by hotels and marketing people. Your idea that consumers should write reviews so they can put cash in their pockets would only further taint the credibility of hotel-review sites. Cross this idea off your list, please. Keep the commercialism out of user-generated content, puleez:)
Dennis Schaal’s last blog post..Yapta-Yapta-Doo
I think there’s only one way that Kayak is ever going to be able to compete with TripAdvisor – by innovation. For example, TripAdvisor’s weak spot is verifying the autheticity of reviews. They’re sacrificing verification in order to maintain the quantity of reviews. The technology and concept that behind sites like Flipkey is the kind of thing that scares them. If Travelpost can come up with something like that and implement it before TripAdvisor, then you can at least peel off a huge amount of their readers, if not the reviewers.
[...] original founder of TravelPost and now founder/CEO of DealBase.com, has two theories. Either Kayak is really trying to beat TripAdvisor in the hotel review market, or “TravelPost is a head fake meant to pull TripAdvisor into a defensive posture to protect [...]