LONDON – 2 March 2011 – TripAdvisor®, the world’s largest travel website, today announces the expansion of its senior team with the appointment of John Dila, in the newly created position of Director, Customer Care. Dila’s role includes developing and launching a new global customer care unit dedicated to supporting the hospitality industry and TripAdvisor’s member community.

In his new role, Dila will lead TripAdvisor’s new Customer Care operations, shape TripAdvisor’s support strategy and service culture and build a global team of customer service agents. This team will be dedicated to delivering a superior customer experience for TripAdvisor’s member and owner communities.

As Dila looks to improve overall customer service, the initial priority will be to better serve the owner community. To this end, one initiative Dila and the Customer Care team aim to deliver on is a streamlined management response system that will make it quicker and easier for owners to post management responses that meet TripAdvisor’s policies.

Dila has a wealth of experience in ecommerce and customer service. He joins TripAdvisor from InnoCentive Inc., an open innovation crowd-sourcing startup, where he led the community and product business unit. Prior to that, Dila spent six years at eBay, developing and running the customer experience teams and customer support strategy.

“We’re delighted to have John on board,” commented Stephen Kaufer, Co-Founder and CEO of TripAdvisor. “He’s a crucial addition to TripAdvisor and we look forward to John building this new team and improving the experience of both property owners and travellers. We are committed to improving service standards and this hire underscores our desire to act more efficiently on user and owner feedback.”

John Dila will be based in TripAdvisor’s head office in Newton, Massachusetts and will be charged with evaluating TripAdvisor’s current support systems and will announce specific updates in due course.

“I look forward to building TripAdvisor’s global customer care unit,” commented Dila. “The owner and member communities are the linchpins of TripAdvisor, so we’ll be listening carefully to their feedback as we aim to provide the best possible customer support for all of our users.”

For further information and an in-depth interview with John Dila, see here: http://tripadvisor4biz.wordpress.com/

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For further information please contact: Laurel Greatrix, TripAdvisor - 0203 194 2150 / 0777 801 3639 / lgreatrix@tripadvisor.com