Today, TripAdvisor, the leading travel research site, announced the addition of an advanced hotel selection tool that enables travelers to easily view a destination's most popular hotels by price, neighborhood and star class. This comes as an addition to the highly regarded TripAdvisor Popularity Index, which uses more than 1 million reviews to rank over 135,000 hotels worldwide.

"Having a great trip means finding the hotel that's right for you," said Christine Petersen, vice president, marketing. "TripAdvisor.com is the only place on the web that allows a traveler to benefit from the experience of hundreds of thousands of others to narrow your options to the most popular hotels in a destination then sort by the criteria that are right for an individual traveler. No other site can provide this level of ease and confidence in planning a future trip."

According to TripAdvisor, travelers consider price, location and quality to be the most important factors when choosing a hotel. The new advanced hotel selection tool is seen on TripAdvisor.com's destination-based hotel overview pages and includes:

   * Price filter - Users can select a price range to find comparably
     priced hotels.  For example: the most popular hotels between $100-
     $200.

   * Neighborhood filter - Users can select neighborhoods from 40 top U.S.
     and international cities and can find hotels located within those
     areas.  For example: the most popular hotels in the Back Bay area of
     Boston or Knightsbridge in London.

   * Star class filter - Users can select a hotel class and find a complete
     listing of hotels with that star rating.  For example: the most
     popular 3-star hotels.

All of these criteria work together to narrow the most popular hotels in a destination to a manageable, relevant list. In addition, travelers now have access to more accurate, timely hotel and planning information:

   * More up-to-date hotel prices - Hotel prices are updated nightly using
     a proprietary algorithm and adjusted to reflect periods of tight
     availability and seasonal fluctuations.

   * Automatic currency conversion - Users can select a preferred currency
     and see converted hotel prices alongside original hotel prices.

   * Hotel mini-snapshots - Each hotel listing is summarized in a brief
     overview consisting of address, photo, TripAdvisor summary user review
     rating, three most recent TripAdvisor user reviews, typical price, and
     QuickCheck - TripAdvisor's proprietary tool that gives users one-click
     access to hotel prices and availability from multiple booking sites.

For an example of how the selection tool works, please visit: www.tripadvisor.com/Hotels-g186338-zfc3-zfn9-zfp2-London_England-Hotels.html

TripAdvisor Popularity Index

TripAdvisor Popularity Index is the first index of its kind to dynamically rank hotels worldwide based on their popularity, as measured by both the quantity and quality of real reviews posted on TripAdvisor by real travelers.

Star Class Ratings

The consumer hotel classification ratings are provided by NorthStar Travel Media. With more than 60 years of history, NTM is the world's largest business-to-business publisher in the travel and hospitality industry.

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, Orbitz, hotels.com and American Airlines, for booking upcoming trips. TripAdvisor.com is the 8th most popular travel Website worldwide, according to comScore Media Metrix (January, 2005), 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 part of IAC/InterActiveCorp .

SOURCE: TripAdvisor, Inc.