TripAdvisor cuts hundreds of jobs after Google competition bites | Hacker News Reader

TripAdvisor cuts hundreds of jobs after Google competition bites

bloomberg.com

220 pointsb3n128 comments

Reposting myself on the subject[1]:

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)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21516006

This comment ads nothing of particular value. TripAdvisor, just like many of the businesses that thrived around Google and search engines in general, use SEO to promote their own services. Nothing wrong with that.

The wrong bit here is that Google is acting as a dangerous monopoly, disregarding privacy and as of recently, shamelessly stealing markets from its own customers. Few years ago in Europe it was sanctioned for stealing news from news agencies, and the echo chamber around hn criticised news agencies and governments trying to prevent this madness.

I learned something from ronilans comment.

The truth is most companies tend to last ~20 years (from mom and pop to larger ones) if they are successful. You're lucky if you make it further. This is one of those that isn't going to last much further.

Google is eating the travel industry.

Search for anything travel related and you get pages of Google products and advertising widgets before you get to the first organic result.

The change over the last 5 years is huge.

When I first found Google flights a couple years ago it was ahead of all the other trip aggregators and unbelievably cheaper too. I think it forced the cheapo tickets craze because I had never seen $50 cross country tickets before that, and it practically destroyed all the little deals and gentlemens agreements that the other aggregators undoubtedly had.

Google Flights lack inventory (as they are powered by a GDS so anyone not filing to that GDS will be missing) and to get their incredible speed they cache and calculate prices which results in frequent pricing misses as well.

Pretty soon they'll have enough traffic nobody will be able to afford to fillng the GDS

Just looking for simple statistics and numbers on the tourism and hospitality industry is difficult on google. Every query just returns ads.

Tripadvisor has a strong forum/community, will google's shallow places reviews kill that? Maybe.

Tripadvisor seems somewhat similar to Foursquare, and foursquare seems to be surviving on with their Swarm check-in app and their paid API service etc.

It really hasn't been covered enough just how much Google has replaced organic search results with their own features.

In some cases it's almost all of the above the fold real estate and for shopping they are starting to take over the checkout experience as well.

It's significantly reducing organic traffic and turning e-commerce sites into Google suppliers.

It's been going on a long time, Google's been killing off aggregators by cannibalising their market for almost a decade now.

I do wonder how sustainable it is, previously these aggregators did lots of things at Google's request, cleaning the noise out and laying everything out in nice data-annotations. More fool them, it turns out.

Google cross-references them all, builds their 'own' data and drives them all out of business.

It's pretty scary how much of the digital high streets Google has ruthlessly stolen from us all, and imposing a huge tax for doing pretty much sod all.

I occasionally wonder if anyone would every have the balls to nationalise the search engine, it should be a public utility, not infested with ads covering 90% of the first page as it's become. I'm even semi-serious :)

At the very least I wouldn't mind a nice ruling that Google are now deceptively calling themselves a search engine, and that they can now only show one ad per 10 real results per page.

"Nationalised search service" ... interesting thought. Legions of Librarians, finally compensated justly and lauded for their heroism. Wonder if they'd get uniforms and "be all you can be" recruiting campaigns too.

Something like DuckDuckGo operated like Let's Encrypt. If it can be done for key management, why not search corpus? What's the annual cost, $10MM? Maybe a bit more, but not crazy expensive. Someone with search experience (ChuckMcM or greglindahl) would be able to say with more certainty.

If you want to do something like DDG, proxying some other search engines results, a point of reference could be Ecosia, which publishes financial reports. It looks like they operate on somewhere in the range of 12M/year.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosia https://de.blog.ecosia.org/ecosia-finanzberichte-baumplanzbe... (in German)

You've got a space force with their own wacky uniforms, so anything is possible.

Fun fact: civilians and the Air Force competed for the money used in United States' initial bout in space. But NASA won.

The Space Force uniform was a Kobayashi Maru.

If money was not spent and they used an existing uniform to keep costs low, critics would complain that the uniform does not match the environment.

If money was spent to design a new uniform that matched the environment, critics would complain that money was wasted on uniforms and they would probably acknowledge the comicality of thinking that a uniformed soldier in space would care about camouflage instead of things like breathing and wondering why they're in uniform in the vacuum of space.

Either way, critics will complain and Space Force personnel will continue to exist in desks for the conceivable future, so uniforms should clearly have been optimized for comfort.

Not to get too off topic, but it's clearly a self inflicted problem, where nobody would complain about spending money on space force uniforms if space force's existence made any sense.

Why does militarization of space not make sense? It makes a lot of sense unless you're a pacifist.

The question is whether the people in the Air Force who send stuff into space should have their own unit, or if the creation of the space force was just a rebranding stunt. The creation wasn't without cost; it gave talking points to other countries seeking to increase their militarization in space. It also increases bureaucratic overhead and might --- if they eventually become more independent --- cause integration issues.

Few dispute the military should have some people who do space stuff, many dispute that they should be on equal footing administratively to the rest of the military.

> For now, the 16,000 active-duty airmen and civilians who work at Air Force Space Command will be assigned to the Space Force, but nothing else will change. Uniforms, a rank structure, training and education are all to be determined, and for the foreseeable future, Space Force will continue to be manned by airmen...

> Meanwhile, U.S Space Command, which stood up in August, will continue to exist as a combatant command, similar to Cyber Command, Special Operations Command and others.

> Barrett will be the Space Force’s service secretary, as the service will be nestled within the Air Force Department, the same way the Marine Corps is part of the Navy Department.

> Eventually, she said, those services’ space commands will be rolled into Space Force, and those personnel will transfer branches. In the more immediate future, officials said, soldiers and sailors could be detailed to Space Force.

https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-military/2019/12/21/...

We had a bunch of international treaties to prevent war in space, which would be disastrous for humanity in a way similar to nuclear war. Our leaders now seem to have decided it's okay because they could probably win.

It's because as soon as people militarize space nobody can get anything done in space.

In space you are so much more vulnerable than in any conceivable environment on earth. Survival depends on others not having layers of other agendas, several of which may be to find ways to kill you.

Imagine how much space exploration will cost if not only do you need to get to space, but you need to bring defensive and offensive weapons as well.

the comicality of thinking that a uniformed soldier in space would care about camouflage

Consider that air forces throughout the world wear blue uniforms, yet no individual in uniform is ever going to attempt to camouflage themselves against the sky...

It would probably be a civil service so more like the IRS or something.

Cannibalising publishers is a separate issue from showing too many ads, and I don't follow which of these you think nationalizing a search engine will solve.

This makes me think about how Google has begun to demand recipe sites include Calorie counts.

Are we a few years away from Google Recipe Search?

One of the sites I maintain has a collection of recipes. It was only when Google started sending me email because they lacked calorie counts that I realized what a terrible idea microdata is for everyone but Google.

I have since taken all of the microdata out of the HTML. If google wants it, it can pay for it.

> everyone but Google

... and the users of Google. Being able to see things like calorie counts directly in search results is awesome. Seriously, if you Google "banana bread" you get recipe ratings, cooking time, and calories right in the list of results. The UX is exceptional.

Why would you need or care about the calorie-count of a recipe?Either you want that food or not. Your guts will tell you.

Is having a natural approach to food no longer normal?

It makes it easy to compare how healthy a recipe is. I often do many searches looking for the differences in recipes with lower sugar levels. Then also how this changes preparation.

It's awesome, but it is also just a click away and that data isn't google's. That 'exceptional UX' is at the expense of someone else's work with google reaping the profits.

It also allows things like Google Assistant to work.

At the minimum, a nationalized web index would be fantastic (modulo the normal concerns above government censorship that already apply). It would reduce so much duplicated effort if there were a standard government crawler that indexed the web and made that data available to anyone who wanted to use it.

Similar to the way weather data is collected by the government, and multiple private companies use it to produce their own sites and forecasts, you could have different search engines doing different interesting things with the data: compete on UX, or focus on particular niches of search.

As it stands today, we have a Bing-Google duopoly because indexing the whole web is such a massive undertaking.

Amazon (and most successful middlemen) employ this strategy too, so aggressively. Get all the data flowing through you, use that data to screw those who you can profit from replacing. Like the people who made sites with public holidays, clocks, converters, calculators that Google has stolen all traffic from for years. Gradually it expands to larger prey, and it feels like a good experience for consumers so it works.

Amazon uses marketplace to access markets without risk or their own suppliers (making them a one stop shop in the process), then once they have the data, they start selling the stuff directly.

I worked in a music instrument retailer, when Amazon was aggressively trying to capture that industry, and they did start selling through Amazon, and if course Amazon now sells most stuff themselves now.

The problem as I see it is that these gradual monopolies pose huge risks to freedom and choice, as they lobby for themselves, and own bigger chunks of the world. Incentives change once you own entire markets, and it's naïve to think what started as a better experience for users will stay that way with less competition.

Not sure what can be done though. Antitrust stuff is really the last resort, and it's not a guarantee that it will even happen. In the EU it probably will I guess. USA not do sure.

> Not sure what can be done though. Antitrust stuff is really the last resort, and it's not a guarantee that it will even happen. In the EU it probably will I guess. USA not do sure.

Most regulations seemingly aimed at taming monopolies only end up reinforcing them, because megacorps have the means to circumvent/malleate regulations, while small firms do not.

The common-sense implicit mental model of the commercial playing field is a flat market with relatively fixed rules, with an enforcer of market rules (the state). Such a playing field would naturally disfavor unfair monopolies (i.e. those that aren't based on network effects, economies of scale, or superior talent).

Obviously, reality is very different: the market rules can be rewritten, and the entity in charge of rewriting them is itself a monopoly. So to prevent unfair monopolies, we would have to make that common-sense mental model a reality, which entails reworking national governance itself.

People need to stop putting the bar for anti-competitiveness at monopoly. It just creates an artificial ceiling Microsoft saved apple. AMD and Intel. Etc You get selfmaintained duopolies instead. And to grow they just go into other markets. Sure google doesn't have a search or add monopoly. Can't grow much anymore in those fields because of the rules? Use your dominance to crack other fields, every field.

Microsoft was so close to being broken up for this long ago but now everyone does it...so why do we allow it?

Nationalized or public index, would be something I would get behind. And then other people an companies could build search around it.

Google has gradually moved from search engine of the web to search engine of their products.

Google is pretty much taking your shit nowadays and there is nothing you can do about it. That shit is either a company you built or a product of theirs that you used. They are not a search company, they are a conglomerate. They'll buy you or break you. It's funny when they fail though isn't it? Remember Google+? Who lead that initiative? What a travesty that was. Outside of Gmail, Google's UIs really do suck.

But back to the point. There really isn't anything wrong with what they are doing, they are a typical business. Again, nothing wrong with that. They do stuff for their own self-interest. They are not your friends. Organic search results get in the way of advertising.

Google is pretty much taking your shit nowadays and there is nothing you can do about it

That sounds like Amazon -- if you've got a hot selling product on Amazon, you can expect them to copy it and start selling it under the Amazon brand:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-20/got-a-hot...

Same applies to Microsoft as well. Remember Ami Pro, WordPerfect?

Isn’t Word Perfect still used in the legal profession, because of how it aligns the text with precision during print out? (Or something like that.)

Those Amazon branded products are the only things I really feel comfortable buying from Amazon these days... it's the one item I'm 99% positive they'd never allow co-mingling or other BS sources for.

How is this different than Walmart, Target, or name any grocery store offering their branded version of products in order to drive down prices?

In many cases those store brand products are made by the same manufacturer as the brand names, but I don't think Amazon typically negotiates with the original product owner for manufacturing their clone.

Most of the Amazon X products I can think of are really basic obvious things. Sheets, cables, simple computer peripherals... well OK those are the things I remember ordering offhand that were such things.

My point is that they'd be categorized as basic staple items. Someone else might have sold a particular size or feature of X, but I don't see any reason why Amazon or another competitor wouldn't think to copy it.

Instead (as I made in a different reply a couple hours before yours) I believe it's the strength of Brand Recognition as a form of Quality Control, which is an area that has decayed on Amazon as a whole but less so with their own brand of products.

Not all of their products are "Amazon Basics" products - they have a lot of private label brands that aren't obviously "Amazon".

But the article I referenced above was a company that came out with a nice laptop stand design and a few months later, Amazon started selling one of their own that looked basically the same (but not identical).

> They'll buy you or break you.

You say that like they are equally bad for you. Being bought out is great for the previous owners. (Otherwise, they wouldn't sell.)

Otherwise, they wouldn't sell.

The only reason not to sell is because you believe Google can't break your business before you get a better offer or you can IPO. If you think they can do that then you don't really have much of a choice.

Founders tend to factor this in to their thinking from the start. "Acquired by Google" is often considered a desirable exit goal.

Mostly agreed.

IPO is kind of a sale too. (Though it's relatively easy for founders to keep control in an IPO, given the market's acceptance of weird share voting arrangements.)

>You say that like they are equally bad for you. Being bought out is great for the previous owners. (Otherwise, they wouldn't sell.)

If the other option is being broken then of course you sell. Even if you could make more money in the long run if they weren't holding a gun to your head.

There is something wrong with a monopoly, it's just been so long since any of it has been enforced that people have forgotten. Hopefully that changes soon.

Gmail's UI is very, very bad by contemporary standards — but yes.

> Google is pretty much taking your shit nowadays

Apple is doing the same thing on it's own turf. If you make successful app expect to see 80% functionality crap copy added to next iOS release as a feature.

>Remember Google+? Who lead that initiative? What a travesty that was. Outside of Gmail, Google's UIs really do suck.

I don't think that was an issue with the UI. Their UI was quite nice and the overall UX was too. Thing was they started by driving up hype, then letting a lot of people in but not everyone. Those lots left because it didn't have the main drive of a social media platform. Users. Their friends weren't allowed in yet. And then more people were let in who left. And then everyone. A horrid way to launch.

> Their UI was quite nice and the overall UX was too.

No their UI sucked. One third of the page was occupied by a stupid header you couldn't even reduce or remove with a CSS hack. I hated it. Fortunately now, most websites doing that tend to disappear.

Also, the content of the page itself was 1/3 wide, which is ridiculous when one is trying to read a long blog post.

The Google+ was a disaster UI wise, I would not be surprised it highly contributed to its demise.

>No their UI sucked. One third of the page was occupied by a stupid header you couldn't even reduce or remove with a CSS hack. I hated it.

What? I must have missed that because I don't remember seeing it.

>Also, the content of the page itself was 1/3 wide, which is ridiculous when one is trying to read a long blog post.

Which would be much wider than the actual content on it's main competitor facebook.

I wouldn't call them "a typical business", given their magnitude and ability to distort the Web

Google controls search. Google launches a competitor to a web service presented through search. Competitor takes enough of a hit layoffs are needed.

This screams of a problem. Especially for consumers and a competitive market. The kind of thing that traditionally caused governments to step in.

Google launched a service consumers preferred. What's the issue? That they have a sustained competitive advantage?

Imagine if 70% of roads were privately owned by one company. That company, call it roadle, opened a restaurant chain. There is free parking in front of all roadle restaurants. There are always roadworks around all non roadle restaurants.

This is what search is like today.

Not at all the same comparison. People that don't like Google or their additions to organic search results can simply switch to another competitor.

>Not at all the same comparison.

No, their comparison was perfect! They said roadle owned 70% of roads, not all of them. Sure, businesses can hope that they get their traffic from non-Google search, but if customers are going to Google for 70+% of search, that's a doomed business strategy.

Their point isn't that Google is bad for consumers, it's that it's unfair for businesses if Google is driving all the search to its own properties that you are trying to compete with.

Google is essentially a piece of international infrastructure at this point. If it went out of existence, the productivity of millions of people would take at least a minor nose dive and the funnels for user conversion for businesses would change drastically overnight leading to a macroscopic restructuring of business priorities.

That analogy does not work. It’s more like google is a telephone directory.

The problem with this analogy is it implies people are forced to use roadle if they want to get to 70% of places. They can only allow their own destinations and cease to be a search engine at all. However in this case any competitor can produce an equally complete road system. This is why roadle has to constantly add additional services to entice drivers. Otherwise they're a commodity. To treat it like a private-road dystopia is to deprive customers of the benefits of competition in this market.

That's not what happened.

Google abused their monopoly in search to present ads and their own results first (google places, hotel ads, search ads all come before organic results).

this is self correcting. sites will just block google from stealing their content. inconvenient, but people can't have everything for free, forever

this reeks of internal political problems. this isn't good for google nor for google's partners. the only reason they would autocannibalize is if there are too many engineers sitting around doing almost nothing so they start inventing problems to solve.

That's a bummer. I've found that TripAdvisor reviews tend to have a higher signal to noise ratio than some other sites (including Google's own reviews, where you can tell a lot of the reviews are just being cranked out so that power users can get points and "level up")

They are no angels either, or at least their daughter company. Two weeks ago TheFork featured in Dutch TV program Rambam where they proved that they boost restaurant ratings. They listed their own fake restaurant (possible, no problem) and gave their own reviews, trying to become lowest rated in the ranking.

Giving rebates on couverts may boost your ranking too.

Restaurant owners interviewed are not too happy as well. They feel forced to subscribe because of popularity of the site, but have to pay 2 euro per person per reservation. Also it happens that without their knowledge TheFork arranges the Reservation button on Google search, so they flow through their platform.

edit: To clarify the boosting. If according to ratings the average should be a 5.2 then TheFork would up that and make it e.g. a 6.5

I'm sure all services have similar problems so it's just a matter of picking your poison. The problem is that Google is so synonymous with search that people have forgotten they're a business. They expect the "best/most relevant" search results. Instead they get biased ones that tend to favor Google. And most will just take that as the best result.

And Google does its best to obscure the fact that the search is anything but fair (see also the recent move to blur the lines between paid ad results and organic search results). To most it just looks like the super smart algorithm found exactly what they needed. In reality it just found more Google.

So maybe the problem is not necessarily Google but people's expectations. Nobody asks a McDonald's clerk what the best burger is thinking they'll get a fair comparison with Burger King’s offer. They do expect this from a Google search.

I used to work on the search team at TheFork years ago (we were already a TripAdvisor subsidiary) and don't know about the current practices but back then there was no foul play about the ratings, which is not even the default sorting on the site.

Also, not specifically related to TheFork (because I don't remember...), do all ratings should always have the same weight? Are old ratings as relevant as newer?

If you want to book a romantic dinner are ratings from groups as relevant as the ones from other couples?

Is a new restaurant with two reviews at 7/10 average the same as another one with 200 reviews at 7/10 average ?

There's more to it than first apparent.

Example: http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating....

I would expect rating should be an exponentially weighted moving average, first and foremost, with ratings also weighted by some form of user reputation. The user reputation is the hard part (at least for Amazon I guess)

I used to work at TripAdvisor, and I can corroborate—while I was there the focus was really heavily on fighting back fake reviews and presenting the ones we got as effectively as possible. You can ding them for a lot (the UI has always been kinda painful) but, unlike Yelp, I don’t think they are or have been dirty.

> Restaurant owners interviewed are not too happy as well. They feel forced to subscribe because of popularity of the site, but have to pay 2 euro per person per reservation. Also it happens that without their knowledge TheFork arranges the Reservation button on Google search, so they flow through their platform.

I've always wondered how this works. Especially when most travellers these days rely on Maps / Tripadvisor to plan their trips. Restaurant owners are almost forced to be on those platforms.

This is what happens when you pay huge amounts of money on Google Ads and traffic. They notice that you must be quite profitable if you afford to pay so much, so they come for your market. It will happen more and more and the more you pay to Google the more you help them take you out of the market.

1 more thought on this - Expedia and Booking are next on their menu...

Expedia had a bad last quarter and blamed it on Google. Booking has a good quarter and said they did a better job with retaining visitors to skip Google.

I wish these guys would follow AirBnb in at least pretending to care about design. I know Booking.com is trying, and for that I can retain the knowledge of going directly to Booking.com/AirBnb.

TripAdvisor's site is a nightmare to navigate. It's easier to find things by searching them on Google than trying to navigate TripAdvisor. I won't lose sleep once someone finds out how to arrange their information in a cleaner format.

Tbh, AirBnB is pretty bad to use itself. Not b.com bad but still shouldn't be used as an example.

Can you elaborate why you think they are bad?

I once booked trough booking.com

When I arrived the hotel had all my credit card detalis printed on a paper that was just sitting there.

Never booked again trough that site.

Actually this is all about Amazon.

Apparently in some countries users are going to straight to Amazon for their shopping searches and bypassing Google entirely.

Isn't that a general thing? I hate the quality of Amazon's internal search, but Google's results for shopping related queries are just atrocious in my country. There's barely-related Amazon-Products on the top 5 places, SEO spam on the next 10, a few shops on pages 2/3 and then scam shops.

If it took Google that long to implement it, another search engine will beat them to the punch by simply noting that many users search for this information and would be much happier to get it without clicking through to another site.

The problem is not google. It’s trip advisor itself. It’s simply not helpful anymore.

Fake reviews, and they’re pushing paid events etc using dark patterns.. it wasn’t like that some years ago

Love the lonely planet

Whenever I want to look up the highlights of a place, I look up it's Lonely Planet page. They are written well and have good pictures. The way to compete against a million random reviewers is by upping quality and forming a brand. In some places, Lonely Planet is the only company providing accurate and complete information. It's marvelous.

Unfortunately Lonely Planet's old business model of getting people to pay for content itself has basically stopped working now that there's a million free digital competitors, and they've yet to come up with a replacement that does.

The app is really really cheap. Fair to say underpriced, especially compared to the books. No ads. Quality content. A good structure about essentials and the neighborhoods.

This!

I used to visit Tripadvisor a lot, but then, with time the site became less and less useful - always pushing the next tour, next paid event,

complete disregard to what the site was supposed to be, advice about trips

Hence I stopped visiting altogether.

Yes trip advisor has become irrelevant, in the beginning you could rely on the ratings. Now almost everyone has 4+ stars.

I find Google ratings slighly better.

I really prefer TripAdvisor data and reviews, but it is really difficult to compete to a monopoly. Google also is better at search and integrates better with their own service.

If at least they would allow me to download any city data in advance in their app. It used be possible to download the main cities in advance, but now you must have internet always on. They think that in any country you have internet everywhere.

Interestingly enough, I’m in Italy this week and here Apple Maps sources most of its data from TripAdvisor. I’ve visited their site (clicks on Maps go to it) more this week than in the last five years.

They’ve been a lot more helpful than Yelp reviews etc., too.

> Google has also crammed the top of its mobile search results with more ads. This has forced many companies, including TripAdvisor, to buy more ads from the search giant to keep online traffic flowing.

That seems wild to me: not only does Google get more $ from ads, but they have this massive power to wipe out competitors this way, with minimal repercussions. Two-birds, one stone.

>That seems wild to me: not only does Google get more $ from ads, but they have this massive power to wipe out competitors this way, with minimal repercussions. Two-birds, one stone.

Crazy thing is they are using their competitors money to wipe away competition.

three birds

Any business without physical inventory that can be automated in a way to sell/buy should really worry about Google. Eventually Google will come for that market as their new crop of managers/execs will want to make the number to get their bonus and move up the ladder.

I know a guy who used to work at tripadvisor years ago. At the time Google was trying to start up their own hotel search business but they didn't have the reviews. So Google was initially using reviews submitted to tripadvisor by tripadvisor's reviews. I believe there had been prior agreement for Google to use tripadvisor's reviews for a fee/beter-search-ranking in return? Anyhow, tripadivisor didn't like what was happening so was in the process of telling google that they will stop the arrangement.

And a google exec in the meeting threatened tripadivisor execs that google will lower tripadivisor in the search results, if tripadvisor did stop the arrangement.

This bit was apparently shared in a regularly scheduled company wide meeting.

There's a similar story from Jeremy Stoppelman about Google scraping Yelp content in 2010 even though their licensing agreement ended in 2007.

Source is the Senate Antitrust Committee hearing in 2011 on Google's dominance, the BI link below includes the exhibits as well.

https://www.businessinsider.com/yelp-ceo-on-google-2011-9

I'm sure they'll get fined $1M in 2036 or something. That'll even it all out.

There is a name for that right? "Be fucking evil if it doesn't cost much" or something like that.

I don’t remember exactly how it was shared at Trip, and I think it was “Google Travel” or something rather than just a hotel booking platform, but that story generally lines up with my recollections from 2011-2012. Reading this thread made it come to mind again and I was wondering how it had turned out...

"...The company had just over 3,800 staff at the end of September.." I am surprised why they need such high number of staff when the functionality of the website is limited to content, reviews, search itineraries. Unless they hire field agents and ask them go inquire and write about a new place.

TripAdvisor was listed in the SP500 until late last December. Right there besides Caterpillar and Halliburton.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_S%26P_500_companies

But otherwise ya. They are a website with content, reviews etc.

This along with the comment about them being in the SP500 got me interested. They are doing more than just the site we all immediately thought of when we saw "TripAdvisor". There's also "InstantBooking" [0], widgets, tools, a platform (it seems) for marketing/buying sponsored listings, analytics, "photo tools", and probably more. All of that was just from what they listed on products. Besides this, they are surely doing research, prototyping, and otherwise developing products that haven't/may never see the light of day.

Furthermore, they seem to do a lot of marketing which for them is the obvious stuff like online advertising (probably in-house team), conferences, and I'm guessing also local events. They also do non-obvious stuff such as branding one of little shops inside the Toronto Pearson International Airport [1].

Finally, looking at LinkedIn, here's the breakdown of employees.

1,100 sales 939 engineering 768 operations 652 bizdev and so on. Full screenshot here: https://imgur.com/a/JCoibId

Obviously, there must be some overlap in job functions here, otherwise people are over-reporting that they are employees at the company (LinkedIn claims 5,679 employees). 160 people doing finance doesn't make sense, for instance (well at least imo).

The only conclusion I can make from this data is that they aren't having thousands of people working on just the main website. I'm inclined to guess that they ARE probably bloated, but without knowing anything besides some marketing copy for their other projects, it's hard to say with any confidence.

[0] https://www.tripadvisor.com/InstantBooking [1] https://www.torontopearson.com/en/while-you-are-here/toronto...

From TripAdvisors "About" page:

The subsidiaries and affiliates of TripAdvisor, Inc. own and operate a portfolio of websites and businesses, including the following travel media brands: www.airfarewatchdog.com, www.bokun.io, www.bookingbuddy.com, www.cruisecritic.com, www.familyvacationcritic.com, www.flipkey.com,www.thefork.com (including www.lafourchette.com, www.eltenedor.com, and www.restorando.com), www.holidaylettings.co.uk, www.holidaywatchdog.com, www.housetrip.com, www.jetsetter.com, www.niumba.com, www.onetime.com, www.oyster.com, www.seatguru.com, www.smartertravel.com, www.tingo.com, www.vacationhomerentals.com and www.viator.com.

That's a ton of subsidiary companies and explains a lot IMO.

Most tech companies are similarly overstaffed. For whatever reason, people think they can do more with more people, as though things scaled linearly like they did in traditional industries, but it's a different paradigm, and it's at best a logistic curve, if not sigmoid.

Trip Advisor has been fairly hit and miss for me. The star ratings especially for hotels have a weird value judgement in them that isn't at all congruent with mine. I'll see run down crappy hotels with 5 stars while much much nicer hotels with better amenities and locations are rated with 3 stars.

Some way to specify the profile of the rater's you care about would be a huge improvement. Things like traveling with children, back-packing, splurging on vacation, would be helpful criteria to make the reviews more relevant and informative to me.

I like more personal contact, nature and simplicity than amenities. I always list the reviews from worst to best. If the bad reviews says things like "there are no TV in the room" I just ignore it. You must read the review, specially the bad ones instead of just counting the stars.

check out what i'm making at https://dokomaps.com a simple travel recommender based on lists of what people shared previously. Just find someone that matches your interest and follow their recommandations

Very nice site!

Pretty much every site that depends on Google search and organic traffic is in trouble. Trip Advisor, Expedia, Booking.com, most OTAs. Their lunch is being eaten.

Yup, next up: Yelp.

Personally I stopped using TripAdvisor in favor of Google Maps. Also stopped using Yelp in favor of Google Maps. It's all integrated so nicely, no need to open another app for reviews.

I'm as surprised as anyone, but Yelp seems to be holding on. G's reviews just aren't as good, and don't seem to be as critical. Not sure if it's just easier to game? Pretty much everything on Google maps is a 4.0.

Yelp hasn't grown outside the US though while Google Maps/Local has gotten bigger worldwide.

I eat out and travel a lot, I rarely use TripAdvisor anymore. When I want to find a decent restaurant nearby I open Google Maps, for hotels booking.com reviews haven't failed me yet. I mostly use TripAdvisor when I want to be more specific with the reviews eg. filter by couples in winter

Oddly enough they were head-hunting super intensely last year. I wonder if they were doing that to hire devs for lower pay in order to let go more senior individuals to save money...

How can I read this article, it is behind a paywall?

Try deleting cookies? (click the padlock by the url in Chrome)

this killed Trivago too

I see a ton of Trivago ads on tv for many years now, but I never used it, nor do I ever heard of a friend using it or recommending it

> The [Federal Court of Australia] ruled that from at least December 2016, Trivago misled consumers by representing its website would quickly and easily help users identify the cheapest rates available for a given hotel.

> In fact, Trivago used an algorithm which placed significant weight on which online hotel booking site paid Trivago the highest cost-per-click fee in determining its website rankings and often did not highlight the cheapest rates for consumers.

https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/trivago-misled-consume...

why do people keep having their content for free for google to use? it doesn't make sense anymore. the google web social contract is broken, there is no tit for tat anymore. only paywall sites get it right now.

I have added from pictures to missing places into Google. For me, the tit for tat is to help other travellers to find interesting places, to not get lost or to know what to expect when in a foreign country/city.

But, I always contribute similar content to Wikipedia/Wikicommons. Because I see that as a more fitting philosophy for sharing knowledge. The type of information and the format is not the same, thou.

Google is just practical. It is frustrating to plan a visit to a museum in a city that I will spend one day to find out that has been closed for half a year.

So, I agree as I have my own self-doubts about giving things for free to Google when they are going to use that data to send me or others more targeted advertisements.

i probably should clarify, i was referring to businesses, not people. Right now, opening up your website to google, is basically an invitation to steal your content. Paywalls are the only way to keep them from doing it.

because grim reality is that there is no other way around this. And the paywalled sites argument - even they are providing their content to google, it's just the user who gets paywall. Another question is if this does even work - maybe for top 50 sites? Even here on HN where wealthy readers are flexing with their expensive cars, houses, earnings etc. at the same time when paywalled article appears it is circumvented by outline/archive link or criticized.

perhaps if, however, tripadvisor had not been opening its content for free to google, but took it behind a signup-wall (like facebook does), they would have trained users to use their own site instead of google for trip information. It's doable, because the use case of their website is quite specific (i've only used the tripadvisor app while traveling). If they didn't make it so easy for google to impersonate them, they might have had a more loyal, monetizable audience. It's slightly inconvenient for users, but the alternative nowadays is complete destruction of the company.

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