HeBS digital Blog

What do you think about TripAdvisor’s new RSS feed they offer for hotel websites?
Major selling points: You can publish customer reviews about your hotel on your
website, without the clutter of the TripAdvisor website and without the
exposure to Expedia and Hotels.com who dominate this review site. Already 300
hotels have signed up.

Here at HeBS we would never recommend a hotel publish an RSS feed from TripAdvisor
or any other review site. Why? You have no control over who publishes what.
These review sites have been abused by hoteliers trying to hurt the
competition, and by disgruntled guests with lots of time on their hands, and even
by people being paid to write negative or positive reviews.

There is an ideological clash on the Web as we speak: between official content and
Consumer Generated Media (CGM) type of content. Smart travelers need to
make intelligent decisions based on: the official hotel information and descriptions on
the hotel website on one hand, and on the other: peer reviews and CGM
content from sites like www.hotelchatter.com, IgoUgo, etc. Without official
content you cannot “measure” the credibility of CGM content like
peer reviews and vice versa. In other words–you need both.

In our view only hoteliers who have no idea how CGM works and have no CGM
strategy in place would consider the RSS feed from TripAdvisor. Any hotel company
has to have a comprehensive CGM strategy in place that addresses at least the
followinhg 4 aspects:

1. Defensive Strategy: monitoring relevant review sites and reacting immediately
   to negative postings
2. Employee conduct on CGM initiatives: now everyone can become a company spokesperson
   via the CGM initiatives out there. There should be a corporate policy
   in place definining who should represent the company on CGM sites and how they should do it.
3. Corporate CGM initiatives: experience sharing on the hotel website, photo
   sharing, peer-voted top ten lists (e.g. the coolest bars or restaurants, etc),
   blogs, etc.
4. Utilizing CGM sites as an advertising and marketing medium

What do you think about the TripAdvisor RSS feed initiative? Is it a good or bad
idea for hoteliers?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007 at 10:21 am and is filed under Social Media & Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.