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Comment by ronilan | Hacker News Reader

A side note: for anyone not aware (or confused by Silicon Valley tradition on constantly rewriting origin stories), TripAdvisor started in the dot com bubble as a B2B site. They clearly stated their business model was to provide reviews to other sites. Only that after the bubble burst, TripAdvisor had none left. They then basically invented modern SEO: long descriptive URLs, pages pulled out of a db with keyword variations in mind, constantly refreshing content with user submissions, and, the killer, buying links to influence Google’s naive ranking methods (which quickly evolved this to buying entire sites for their SEO potential). The billion dollar public valuation is entirely the result of a decade long SEO play.

(Source: was in online travel related business at the time. Was the first to buy links form Matt at SeatGuru, later acquired by TripAdvisor)

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Tripadvisor's problem isn't SEO, it's Tripadvisor.

They used to have a clean, easy to use site that was useful. As they've optimized and metricized the site to death, it's impossible to use. Harder to use == shittier reviews == lower visits.

Then they started engaging with you afterward. I was on vacation and looked for a restaurant near some I-95 town, and ended up getting spam emails about "Rate your stay in Stony Creek, VA!", "how was McDonald's in Lumberton, NC". Then I stopped using the app.

I won’t cry for TripAdvisor and Expedia, their websites were awful.

Booking Group websites (booking.com and agoda) are still doing great in 2019 as the article states, because they don’t suck

Personally I find booking .com and related sites to be so aggressive and downright manipulative (“40 people are viewing this right now!” “Your dates are super popular, 70% of hotels in this city are sold out!” Showing 5 hotels that are sold out first in order to make you feel desperate to find and book anything!) that I hate using it even though they often have the best prices. So I will do my hotel searches elsewhere and the only go to booking .com once I’ve already made a decision, to check it they have a lower price. See also agoda, trip .com, etc

I hate those manipulative sites. We should give more attention to browser extensions that clear and remove those things. ManipulativeBlock.

"No Stress Booking - Chrome Web Store

Hides all the red alerts and stressful messages from your favourite booking site"

https://www.chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/no-stress-book...

At some point I gave up. It just stopped being worth it for me to save $10 here or $20 there for how much of a navigation PITA these sites are. I just stick to Kayak for booking most things now. It's simple, clean, and straight-forward and they do their best to de-bullshittify the manipulative fees that some airline portals use to artificially make the fare seem low.

Really? Even with all of this crap? https://ro-che.info/articles/2017-09-17-booking-com-manipula...

Maybe I'm kidding myself but I just tune that all out. In the end I read some reviews, look at what we have (and pictures), and check the price. I've generally had good results which is why I still use them.

But Booking.com does suck!

They manipulate you by showing only positive reviews.

When they ask you for a review, they ask you what you liked about the stay, and what you didn't like.

Then they just show the positive stuff to people.

I've booked on booking.com a handful of times, and every times the reviews were either just wrong, or misleading.

What’s better than TripAdvisor for finding sights and experiences?

Very much not a rhetorical question.

Buy a guidebook on Amazon. It’s worth it before a significant trip and saves time compared to sifting through dreck on the Web.

But if you’re in town for business and you happen to have a few extra minutes and you think “hey, what is there to see around here,” TripAdvisor works well enough.

Yelp, Google, Facebook, Foursquare, are all alive and well, as is a lot of local journalism. Subreddits about specific cities also hit well sometimes.

Now if i could just aggregate all their results into one listing per event/location.

Almost like...TripAdvisor

The Google Maps app.

Rick Steves.

TripAdvisor pivoted to booking on their site as the main revenue generator for some years now. But their SEO is still king to drive visits and they have very advances tools in that area.

TripAdvisor is part of the Expedia conglomerate, along hotels.com and another hundred sites.

The strategy has always been to covering everything and bonce users between properties.

"TripAdvisor is part of the Expedia conglomerate"

TripAdvisor and Expedia are each listed on NASDAQ. Perhaps they have some cross-holdings, but they don't appear to be part of a corporate group.

This isn't accurate; they've been separate companies for years now. It's kind of a winding history but the TLDR is TripAdvisor started out as an independent startup. Was purchased by a large holding company, which also owned the Expedia brand (acquired from Microsoft). They then mashed all their travel companies together and spun the resulting behemoth out as "Expedia". A little later, Expedia split TripAdvisor back off into an independent company once again so it could focus on being an OTA.

So it's true they were linked at one time, but that's no longer the case. They're distinct businesses with no formal connection.

(Disclosure: I work for TripAdvisor as an engineer, though I wasn't present when all of that went on)

One thing I find fascinating about Gimlet Media is that there will never be a “Founder’s Myth”. They recorded the story as it was happening.

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