Reputation management has been and will continue to be a major concern for the hospitality industry. The days of Guest Satisfaction Surveys (GSS) being sent via postcard or even via email after a guest’s stay are mostly over, replaced by the alternatives provided by sites like TripAdvisor. Over the last several years many great platforms have been created by various companies to provide “one stop shop” solutions so that hotels and restaurants don’t have to spend countless hours scouring dozens of review sites. Revinate, ReviewPro and Brand Karma are a few that come to mind. This post is not about those providers; it is about an interesting trend that I’ve been seeing from TripAdvisor over the past year that I think could impact those providers.
About a year ago, in January 2011, TripAdvisor launched a blog called “TripAdvisor for Business”. The blog doesn’t appear to have a huge following or a ton of activity, but its purpose is fairly obvious, to create a channel for TripAdvisor to better connect and communicate with hotel operators. From what I can see it serves three main purposes:
- It serves a public relations purpose, in that it gives TripAdvisor something to point to when people critique their shortcomings related to owner support. See this post as an example.
- It provides a channel for TripAdvisor to remind owners of all the options that exist to spend money (advertise) on TripAdvisor’s network of sites. For examples see here and here.
- Lastly, it provides a platform for TripAdvisor to talk about the new tools they continue to rollout in their Owner/Manager Center. They continue to rollout features that provide more value to owners and infringe on the products many third parties have developed. If I was with one of those providers I would be concerned.
A recent article on Tnooz talked about the latest feature that TripAdvisor has introduced for owners, comparison to competitive sets. In my opinion this was one of the value propositions of many of the reputation management platforms, but now you can get a certain level of this information for free. If TripAdvisor continues to rollout more features like this into their Owner’s Center then I think it will only weaken the offering that these platforms offer and make it easier for hotels to forego that monthly subscription and rely on what TripAdvisor is providing them for free.
With that said, the third party platforms do still have a few positives and differentiators. First, they have review data from more than just TripAdvisor, most of them have Expedia, Hotels.com, Orbitz, etc. Secondly, many of them have a rollup feature where brands or ownership groups can combine data from many hotels and summarize the data into a digestible format. However, the key thing is that the reviews ultimately belong to these sites and if they decide to stop providing or selling the review data to third parties like Revinate then that seriously impacts their product offering.
The asset that TripAdvisor has is their review data and as they make decisions like removing their reviews from Google, you have to wonder if they are exploring other ways to use this asset that they have. Also, TripAdvisor recently spun off from Expedia and is now an independent, publicly traded company who is likely looking for future revenue generating opportunities. What better option than to create their own reputation management platform and charge the 1.5 million businesses that are listed a nominal fee for access? What do you think? Will TripAdvisor ultimately diminish the value proposition of reputation management platforms?
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