Inside the Mad, Mad World of TripAdvisor
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I continue to believe that Wikivoyage, the CC-licensed and Wikimedia-hosted fork of Wikitravel, holds great promise, but I've also come to believe that travel reviews of points of interest and the wiki format are conceptually incompatible. As this article illustrates, one man's Angkor Wat is another's pile of boring rocks, and you'd need to build a hybrid -- a Wiki for factual info, and unlimited personal reviews -- to get the best of both worlds.
It's improving, but voyage still trails travel's 4181 alexa rank at 22,638.
That's a huge gap. I've seen an overall drop in content quality and accuracy compared to the pre-internet brands era.
Why was WikiVoyage chosen?
Disclosure: I was potentially an "unnamed co-conspirator" in the lawsuit.
And this is my version of how the split came to be: http://gyrovague.com/2012/07/12/wikitravel-editors-abandon-i...
My question pertained more to branding. Why the name "WikiVoyage?"
I understand Wiki* namespace lock-in due to the Wikimedia relationship, but it doesn't seem like a great differentiator from WikiTravel. IMHO, I don't think the lay person gets the difference. Though "voyage" is a synonym for travel (and the word for travel in French), it associates closer to sailing and cruises.
That said, I did find your blog entries interesting. Thanks!
I can't believe in Wikivoyage at all. Wikitravel has been flawed from the outset and forking into wikivoyage has succeeded in making two bad sites. Trying to apply travel to the (current) wiki model is not going to work.
>...you'd need to build a hybrid -- a Wiki for factual info, and unlimited personal reviews -- to get the best of both worlds.
Tripadvisor does pretty much what you are describing, with a strong emphasis on selling you a hotel room, tour or whatnot. And it is a little light on factual information and heavy on fake opinion.
Time for someone to build something better.
I will move to WikiVoyage now, but I have to say -- WikiTravel still benefits from a better (and a more famous) name. Many people won't even get to know this difference.
Could I export my reviews from there and put them elsewhere if I wanted to?
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1."if a hotel increases its review scores by 1 point on a 5-point scale (e.g., from 3.3 to 4.3), the hotel can increase its price by 11.2 percent and still maintain the same occupancy or market share"
2."1-percent reputation improvement leads up to a 1.42-percent increase in revenue per available room (RevPAR)"
#1's substantial
It's got its up-and-downs. It's a highly profitable company that still wants to hire smart people, so it bills itself as a "startup culture." Then you join and you're in a multi-level org chart with different silos literally competing for resources and attention. Very corporate. So their turnover is pretty fast, particularly in engineering.
It is a very profitable company with legit tech and legit scale, so there are some great experiences to be had there if you're lucky enough to land on the right team or impress the right boss. And because they have a pretty high bar for hiring and a reasonably high burnout rate, having worked a few years at TA means something to many Boston tech companies.
As a first gig out of college, it was great and I don't regret spending time there. It was a gentle-enough introduction to large corporate structure and while I'm not temperamentally suited to "Cog #541" type of gigs, it's easy to see why as a company it's very successful.
(And, having seen a few organizations handle fraud in user-generated content, I think Trip does a pretty good--not great, not perfect, but better than anybody else I've seen--job of it.)
He also got a visit from Yelp, that didn't demand anything in exchange for listing his business.
Responding to TP comments usually isn't very high on their priority list, and even lower is actually addressing the problems underlined in those comments.
And then they complain that bookings are going down, and come up with imaginary reasons.
Does Trip Advisor sell "trends" to hotels ("here are where your bookings are going" / "see how your competitors are doing", etc.)? If it doesn't it should -- that would be a big help.