NEEDHAM, Mass., Feb. 1, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Tripadvisor, the world's largest travel guidance platform, today announced that its community of travelers has enabled the company to reach a major and historic Internet milestone: 1 BILLION reviews and opinions.

Tripadvisor was founded 22 years ago by current President and CEO Stephen Kaufer, Langley Steinert, Nick Shanny and Tom Palka. Reaching this incredible landmark comes just several years after announcing it had reached half a billion reviews and opinions, in 2017. New research shows that today the Internet platform remains the most important review destination online for millions of consumers and businesses.

Tripadvisor has become a brand that is trusted, known, and loved across the globe. It is a resource that millions of travelers and diners rely on to help inform them on where to stay, what to eat, what to do and how to make the most of their trips — all based on guidance from a community of contributors who have been there, done that before.

"We are so grateful for the contributions that the Tripadvisor community has made over these last 22 years. Trusted reviews and opinions from travelers are the heart and soul of the platform and help make everyone a better traveler, enabling millions of businesses to flourish and drive trillions of dollars in economic value across the globe," said Stephen Kaufer, President and CEO, Tripadvisor.

To mark the occasion, Tripadvisor released new research titled The Power of Reviews. This analysis about review content on Tripadvisor's platform showcases why the company's long-form reviews are a qualitative grade above other review platforms, especially when it comes to influencing booking decisions.

Tripadvisor reviews are 3x longer than the reviews found on leading online travel agent websites and search engines, with the average length of an accommodation review coming in at 688 characters. It's the detail that these long-form reviews provide that offers travelers such invaluable guidance. This, along with the sense of community that Tripadvisor offers to the millions who come to the platform every month, has played a huge part in driving such phenomenal growth in content — first, by reaching 1 billion reviews and opinions, and second, by doubling what it took 17 years to achieve in just five.

A Look Back and Some Fun Facts About the First Billion

In celebration of reaching this milestone, Tripadvisor has collected some interesting stats about the content that has been submitted to the platform over the past two decades:

• The most-reviewed accommodation ever: Luxor Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, with over 48,000 reviews.
• The most-reviewed restaurant ever: Pastéis de Belém in Lisbon, Portugal, with over 52,600 reviews.
• The most-reviewed attraction ever: Basílica de la Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, Spain, with over 164,000 reviews.
• The longest English language review ever written on Tripadvisor: 17,241 words written by @The_Budges about their stay at the Hotel Playa Pesquero Resort in Cuba.
• The most-prolific Tripadvisor reviewer: @82manuelal from Luxembourg City, who has posted more than 7,000 reviews since becoming a Tripadvisor member in 2015.
• Number of posts in the Tripadvisor forums: 89,426,160 posts (and counting).
• The first forum post: submitted Aug. 26, 2004 and still visible today.
• The longest active thread in a Tripadvisor destination forum: "How many days till Maui???" in the Lahaina Forum, with 6,809 replies and dating back to Oct. 4, 2006.
• Hungry anyone? The three most-mentioned dishes in restaurant reviews:
• Pizza (10,400,980 mentions)
• Pie (8,467,574 mentions)
• Salad (7,374,595 mentions)
• The traveler who has posted the most photo submissions: @PaoloRiccardoCarrara, who is from Rome and has contributed a whopping 102,272 submissions, totaling 313,651 photos.
• The award for the most well-traveled Tripadvisor member: @damienstack, who has posted reviews for 176 different countries. He is from Listowel in County Kerry, Ireland, and has actually visited all 193 countries in the world!

Meh!-mory Lane: Everyone's a Critic
And then there are the reviews from travelers who didn't quite "get" the iconic places they were reviewing…

• New York's Empire State Building: "Building is too tall, meaning I felt sick as heights aren't my favourite thing."
• San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge: "First off, it is not golden in any way-it's an ugly brown colour…"
• The U.K.'s Stonehenge: "Why people come from all around the world to see a pile of stones, I will never understand."
• Arizona's Grand Canyon: "I've been to a number of so called landmarks in my time - but what the hell was this? Just an overblown sandy ditch."

The Power of Reviews
Tripadvisor continues to help millions of travelers make travel decisions month after month. After 22 years, the platform now boasts 1 billion reviews and opinions, but how does Tripadvisor stack up in terms of relevance among today's traveler or the millions of businesses it continues to serve?

To answer those questions and more, Tripadvisor has released the results of the Power of Reviews study. In 2021, Tripadvisor, in partnership with a third-party market research firm, surveyed 9,000 consumers across five countries — the U.S., U.K., Italy, Singapore, and Australia — to take a deeper dive into how different review types influence the travel-planning and decision-making process.

Some of the key findings from the study include:

• Of all the kinds of feedback types on Tripadvisor and other review platforms — ratings, snippets and long-form descriptive reviews — 40% of travelers said the content of a review (a long-form description) mattered most when reading reviews.
• Tripadvisor is winning against other platforms in this category, with 100% of accommodation reviews on the platform being long-form reviews.
• 88% of respondents rated long-form reviews as high or very high quality.
• Between snippets, bubble ratings, and long-form reviews, 76% prefer long-form reviews when booking accommodations, 74% prefer long-form reviews when researching restaurants, and 69% prefer long-form reviews when exploring attractions.
• This translates to a higher booking propensity: 68% are more likely to book after reading a long review.
• 3 out of 4 respondents said online reviews were "extremely or very important" when making travel decisions. This is true across the board for accommodations (82%), attractions (77%), and restaurants (70%)

The Power of Reviews study can be read in full here:  https://www.tripadvisor.com/PowerOfReviews

'Write a Review Day' on May 3, 2022
In the first 10 months of 2020 alone, the tourism industry lost $935 billion in revenue worldwide because of the pandemic*. Sadly, as a result, more than 350,000 businesses on Tripadvisor have been reported as closed since March 2020. The good news is that over that same period, more than 1,263,031 new business listings have appeared on Tripadvisor.

To commemorate reaching the incredible milestone of 1 billion reviews and opinions, Tripadvisor is launching Write a Review Day, set for May 3, 2022, and every first Tuesday of May thereafter. The platform is rallying the Tripadvisor community and encouraging travelers to write a review about a recent hotel stay, experience booked or culinary moment at a restaurant in an appeal to offer invaluable guidance to other travelers as they begin to take to the roads, seas and skies again, and to give the tourism industry helpful feedback that may aid in getting it back on its feet.

Throughout the month of May, ahead of the busy summer season in the Northern Hemisphere, Tripadvisor will continue to celebrate its reviews, forum discussions and community contributions that help provide guidance to others planning their next vacation or holiday.

Avid reviewers, and even those who have never written a review themselves — positive or more constructive critiques, can use May 3 as a start to celebrate the act of giving feedback all throughout the month. Tripadvisor will help remind travelers how a review has the ability to change lives, guiding those who read them toward incredible experiences that create lifelong memories, and helping those who receive them to get the recognition they deserve, or the insight needed to evolve and improve.

To take part in Write a Review Day, click here to post a review. Show your support of the travel and hospitality industry by sharing your review on your social media channels with the hashtag #WriteAReviewDay .

Notes to editor

• All fun and interesting stats related to Tripadvisor content are accurate as of Jan. 12, 2022.
• Revenue lost as reported in Forbes in January 2021: https://www.forbes.com/sites/duncanmadden/2021/01/14/the-covid-19-pandemic-has-cost-the-global-tourism-industry-935-billion/.
• Businesses reported as closed on Tripadvisor may have closed for other reasons than COVID-19.

Power of Reviews Study Methodology:
Phase 1:
Conducted a third-party research study in Q3 2021. The online general population survey — deployed by Qualtrics — gathered responses from 9,000 consumers across five countries: U.S., U.K., Italy, Singapore, and Australia. Conditions of respondents:

• Must be 18-75 years old
• Must not work in travel / tourism industry
• Must have taken a personal / leisure trip in the past 2 years
• Must have used a travel website in the past 2 years
• Must be primarily responsible for trip planning / booking or share responsibility.

Phase 2:

Analyzed a competitive data set of reviews across the largest online review platforms
2.9M reviews analyzed

• 492K Hotels
• 2.4M Restaurants

Published between 2018-2021
16k properties

• 1.7K Hotels
• 14K Restaurants

Phase 3:

Conducted a third-party survey — deployed by Qualtrics — in five major markets (United States, United Kingdom, Italy, France and Spain) to assess hotel (274) and restaurant (815) owners' perception of Tripadvisor and how it compares against other platforms across five main areas:

• Business Sentiment and 2021 predictions
• Response to Covid-19
• Covid-19 support
• Trust & Content
• Relationship with and usage of Tripadvisor

About Tripadvisor
Tripadvisor, the world's largest travel guidance platform*, helps hundreds of millions of people each month** become better travelers, from planning to booking to taking a trip. Travelers across the globe use the Tripadvisor site and app to discover where to stay, what to do and where to eat based on guidance from those who have been there before. With more than 988 million reviews and opinions of nearly 8 million businesses, travelers turn to Tripadvisor to find deals on accommodations, book experiences, reserve tables at delicious restaurants and discover great places nearby. As a travel guidance company available in 43 markets and 22 languages, Tripadvisor makes planning easy no matter the trip type.

The subsidiaries of Tripadvisor, Inc. (NASDAQ:TRIP), own and operate a portfolio of travel media brands and businesses, operating under various websites and apps, including the following websites:

www.bokun.io, www.cruisecritic.com, www.flipkey.com, www.thefork.com, www.helloreco.com, www.holidaylettings.co.uk, www.housetrip.com, www.jetsetter.com, www.niumba.com, www.seatguru.com, www.singleplatform.com, www.vacationhomerentals.com, and www.viator.com.

* Source: SimilarWeb, unique users de-duplicated monthly, September 2021
** Source: Tripadvisor internal log files

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SOURCE Tripadvisor