TripAdvisor’s Wiki Ups Travel Stakes
Important Details: Tom Friedman’s tome notwithstanding, our Web world just keeps getting more dimensional. TripAdvisor is a site worth watching by news and travel publishers. It has grown in popularity as travelers find tips on good condos in Hawaii, river outfitters on the Colorado, and New England inns during leaf-peeping time. Now it seems to be adding a new dimension, with the recent public announcement of its wiki beta.
The wiki is another wake-up call for publishers of traditional travel content. If you don’t find a way to make it available on travel sites that travelers in droves are using, well, then, the sites will just find another way of creating "content," leaving you in the dust.
TripAdvisor built itself on nothing more revolutionary than word of mouth. That’s way simpler for everyone to understand than the technical intricacies of user-generated content or "UGC" (UGH! what an acronym). Word of mouth is what travelers have long done. We give each other opinions all the time, and we weigh them more heavily as our knowledge of the source grows.
TripAdvisor figured out that we love to share those travel tips. It cleverly used technology to make that sharing easier and searchable, and to achieve critical masses in some areas, so that a traveler really could get a good sense of her choices. The company also understood that its users were prime targets for the booking companies, like Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz, Hotwire, Hotels.com, and Priceline, all of which buy leads from TripAdvisor at rates we hear are growing as TripAdvisor conversions skew high.
The new wiki, branded TripAdvisor Inside, so far focuses on three cities: Los Angeles, Boston, and London. It’s a modest beta effort, urging members to build out – in fact, not opinion – such areas as architecture, recommended reading, and safety. If TripAdvisor Inside can gain the kind of mass that Wikipedia has, those planning travel may go there to get facts about destinations – and then toggle over to read travelers’ own takes on the places.
Here’s a line publishers will love: "Better than a whole shelf of travel guidebooks." True? Not really, but as publishers of guidebooks, travel magazines, and Sunday travel sections have all failed to find ways to get their highly useful content to Web users, they’re making it seem true. Sure, traditional publishers have traditional revenue to protect, and parsing travel content – and photos! – to make it easily transmittable, trackable, and searchable on the Web takes some work, but the time has come to get fully into the game.
Consider these recent stats, from a report out of Sen. Chuck Schumer’s office (he wants airline surcharges better disclosed) on how much money passes through the online booking trade:
"The most popular form of travel booking is online. Nearly 50 percent of airline ticket sales and reservations [were] conducted exclusively online during the first six months of 2005. Forty-seven million Americans bought travel online in 2005, up 7 million more than in 2004, according to PhoCusWright, a Connecticut-based travel research firm. Travelers will spend about $79 billion online for leisure and self-booked business travel according to them."
Our own recent "News Users" study of 2,800 Web users revealed that the Web is now the No. 1 destination for travel info. As our graph shows, 53 percent start with Google/Yahoo!/MSN/AOL, often seeking to find a needle in a haystack. Forty percent go directly to buying sites like Orbitz and Travelocity, as well as to direct-to-consumer airline and hotel sites, and travel info sites like TripAdvisor which offer the glue between information – generated at no cost by people like us – and booking.
Chart: https://clients.outsellinc.com/now/wp-content/UserFiles/Image/osnow-OSNow050206TravelInfoNewsUsers.PNG
In Outsell’s Opinion: Publishers need to go beyond paper to glue as well – now. Great travel content, stories, data, charts, and photos have evergreen, seasonal, and annual uses. Properly formatted for export and for licensing, such data can be used in TripAdvisor-like ways to keep people on travel-oriented sites, and that means booking revenue shares.
Outsell believes that the first waves of user-generated content and wikis are just the beginning. Sites such as TripAdvisor have found it too hard to get publishers to provide useful travel content, so they’ve done it themselves. News providers and publishers must dig out that good travel stuff they are paying people to produce and get into the markets. Simple protectionism – keeping it off the Web – won’t work, and selling it newspaper-by-newspaper or magazine-by-magazine or book-by-book won’t work. But intelligent aggregation of travel content – across titles and across geographies – to create packages of content useful and attractive to travel sites can be a winning ticket, if bought quickly.