TripAdvisor, the leading travel research site, announced today that it has launched Forums, a free, site-wide feature designed to allow users to post, read and reply directly to fellow travelers' questions and advice. The addition of Forums to TripAdvisor is part of the company's initiative to expand its popular user reviews into unmoderated, interactive discussions.

With an average of 500,000 daily unique users, TripAdvisor is well positioned to allow consumers to leverage the experience and expertise of fellow travelers. With the addition of Forums, TripAdvisor consumers can not only read unbiased articles, guidebooks and user reviews but can also ask fellow travelers questions such as:

"The beachfront rooms here seem a LOT more expensive than the beachview; are they worth the splurge for our honeymoon?"

"Is the bus from Newark airport into midtown New York City safe for two women alone after dark?"

"Do I have to pay or make reservations to run in the running of the bulls in Pamplona?"

An overview of TripAdvisor's Forums can be found at http://www.tripadvisor.com/ForumHome and forums discussions can be accessed throughout the site. Unlike many other message boards, TripAdvisor's Forums let users search by specific city rather than just state or country, making finding answers and posting questions for specific destinations much faster and easier. Currently covering over 15,000 cities worldwide, TripAdvisor provides a wide geographic landscape to explore.

Because TripAdvisor's Forums are also integrated with other content for a particular city, consumers can easily check out a specific hotel or attraction. For example, users researching Playa del Carmen, Mexico, are shown a sample of a recent discussion on the destination and are invited to ask a question or reply with information from their own personal travel experience. If they notice a hotel such as Royal Hideaway Playacar mentioned in the discussion, they can easily click on the Hotels tab for Playa del Carmen to do more research on that particular hotel.

TripAdvisor's Forums are free and easy to use. A simple registration process protects users' privacy and provides security while allowing a user to establish a screen name for use within the community.

"TripAdvisor has a very strong following of users that come to our site and post more than 1,000 reviews daily. These reviews provide fellow travelers first-hand accounts, both good and bad, of recent travel experiences," said Steve Kaufer, CEO of TripAdvisor. "It made perfect sense for us to expand this one way dialogue into interactive Forums. In this manner, consumers can not only read reviews, but can also directly share their travel expertise and discuss specific travel experiences to help each other make smarter travel decisions."

About TripAdvisor

TripAdvisor, Inc. provides a comprehensive travel search engine that helps consumers research their travel plans via the web, and gives them direct access to major online travel suppliers, including Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz, hotels.com and American Airlines, for booking upcoming trips. TripAdvisor.com is the 7th most popular travel website worldwide, according to comScore Media Metrix (July, 2004), and has won dozens of awards, including PC Magazine's Top 100 Web Sites and Forbes Best of the Web. The company also offers travel suppliers a performance-based marketing medium that generates average click-through rates of over 10% per page. TripAdvisor is a wholly owned operating business of IAC/InterActiveCorp and is part of IAC's Local and Media Services Group. For more information, visit http://www.tripadvisor.com/.

SOURCE: TripAdvisor