November 22, 2002-- TripAdvisor, Inc. (www.TripAdvisor.com),the leader in search engine technology for the travel industry, announced today the release of its new Hotel Popularity Index. In contrast to other hotel indexes which statically rank hotels alphabetically or by price, TripAdvisor's new hotel index is the first of its kind to dynamically rank hotels worldwide based on the popularity of a given hotel, as measured by both the quantity and quality of content written about the hotel on the web. Travel consumers can now refer to one unique web index to gauge ever-changing opinions about more than 75,000 hotels worldwide.
About TripAdvisor's Hotel Popularity Index
As a specialized vertical market search engine for the travel space, TripAdvisor regularly scours the web for articles, opinions and reviews about a wide range of travel topics. As part of this process, TripAdvisor retrieves links to comprehensive information from the web about particular hotel properties.
With links to guidebooks, newspaper reviews and user-submitted opinions, TripAdvisor's search technology retrieves unbiased, hard-to-find information about a hotel - both good and bad. Using this wealth of information about hotels, TripAdvisor's Hotel Popularity Index assigns an overall score to each hotel and ranks all of the hotels in a given destination. As the information found on the web is constantly growing, the Hotel Popularity Index also changes, giving consumers an "up-to-date" view of the most popular hotels in a given city.
The Bellagio - "I'll be back"...
As an example, with links combed from the web to over 39 individual articles, reviews and opinions, both positive and negative, The Bellagio Hotel topped the Hotel Popularity Index for Las Vegas (see URL): http://www.tripadvisor.com/Hotels-g45963-Las_Vegas_Nevada-Hotels.html
Many of the links for the The Bellagio are web postings from actual hotel guests. User reviews of The Bellagio include comments like, "I'll be back... have started saving for a return visit," "[The Bellagio] is Class A across the board," and "the buffets are to die for." With links to a wide variety of web content, from first-person trip reports to newspaper articles and guidebooks, TripAdvisor's Hotel Popularity Index takes many different sources into account.
Unlike an airline ticket, a hotel purchase requires substantial research. While the actual booking engines on the popular travel web sites have evolved over the years, the research component of choosing a hotel has not. Despite the wealth of information available out on the Internet today, choosing the right hotel in a given destination is still a time-consuming task. TripAdvisor's new Hotel Popularity Index now gives consumers a quantitative feel for how the populace rates a given hotel - easing the research component of booking a hotel online.
"When choosing a hotel, most people ask their friends and family for recommendations, but the web provides the unique opportunity to discover what the populace as a whole thinks about a particular hotel," said Steve Kaufer, CEO of TripAdvisor. "Information on hotel properties is out there on the web, but until now it has been really hard to find and summarize in one place. With TripAdvisor's Hotel Popularity Index, consumers now have a quick, easy way of gauging the overall popularity of hotels for thousands of popular destinations, all with the click of a mouse."
