The Future of Hotel User Review Sites

It's been a while--thanks for checking back in on us again! We were in San Francisco for a brand conference and came back to a paperwork tornado, but we're glad to be back in the saddle again.

One of the most prominent topics at the Hilton Garden Inn conference was social media (how appropriate!) and its uses and relevance in 2011 and forward. While the general consensus is that Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and the like can be tremendously helpful in marketing hotels, opinions on how to use those channels and who should be using them vary widely. Just in the past two weeks, we have heard opinions ranging from "every hotel needs to have a Facebook for business page and a Twitter account" to "Facebook is necessary, Twitter is not" to "Facebook and Twitter are time hogs--only use Facebook ads and monitor any chatter on social media" (I even saw an article recently that claimed Twitter was much more vital to hotel marketing than Facebook). Clearly, the jury is still out. For retail outlets, restaurants, and local service industries, the power of social media has been well-documented, but hotels are still trying to define the role of social media in marketing and sales, and that conversation may continue for some time.

There is one thing that everyone agreed on, though: online user reviews and ratings have become an enormous part of our business, to the point of obsession. Trip Advisor has long been the big kid on the block when it comes to lodging reviews, and hotels could check once or twice per month for any additional reviews on Expedia, Orbitz, Hotels.com, and Priceline. Recently, though, a number of other review sites have jumped in and threatened to change the game for Trip Advisor, creating an enormous headache for hoteliers (and restaurateurs) along the way.

With Yelp!, Kayak's TravelPost, HotelMotelReviews.com, Hotel-Rankings.com, Zoom and Go, and Google Reviews/Places now in the mix (and a host of similar but smaller sites), travelers have a plethora of sources to choose from when seeking user feedback on destinations. The flip side of the coin, of course, is that business owners must watch, monitor, and respond to dozens of sites offering reviews rather than just a few. Hotel brands are scrambling to develop sophisticated social media monitoring software, but the task is enormous. Hoteliers are assigning staff members the task of spending hours per week scouring all of the review sites for feedback and responding to all reviews. Hotel sales forces are trying to adjust to a world in which there are actual ratings systems and decide whether they help or hurt.

The proliferation of these sites can be exciting or frustrating depending on your needs, but historical evidence suggests that two of these sites will establish themselves as dominant and push the others out.

The best frame of reference is the search engine explosion of the mid-1990s. As search engine technology was new, developing, and highly lucrative, a ridiculous number of search engines burst onto the scene, each one generating significant buzz for new and different features. Lycos, Excite, Altavista, Hotbot, WebCrawler, and Yahoo all offered slightly different services, but the general public saw them all as search engines, and by the early 2000s most were extinct as Google began taking over the search engine market and Yahoo arose as its only true competitor.


That is a highly oversimplified version of events, of course, as buy-outs and technology creep swallowed most of them and others were casualties of bad business decisions, but nonetheless, the same promises to happen with the consumer review sites. The most agile, adaptable sites who can also transition into offering other related services will survive; the others will eventually either fall by the wayside or be absorbed into the eventual winners.


So, which sites will prevail? Until all of the likely contenders have emerged, there is no way to predict the outcome. Our suspicion is that we haven't seen the last of the review sites and apps yet, and given that Google entered the search game relatively late and now reigns as the undisputed king of search engines, we should wait to make any judgments as to who will survive. Each of the review sites offers variations on the theme, which will make the evolution of the growing genre interesting to watch. TravelPost claims to be stepping into Trip Advisor's territory because TA has been compromised and reviews are less authentic than ever before, a legitimate but overrated gripe that has been gaining particular traction in Europe; trying to dethrone TA on that basis, though, will be a monumental task. Yelp! goes beyond the hotel/restaurant model original to TA and encourages reviews of any type of establishment. The issue for Yelp! will be that Google is also entering that space with their Places feature, and their capital and manpower will allow them to grow and adapt the service more quickly than Yelp!, we suspect. The other sites are variations on Trip Advisor, for the most part, trying to carve out their own spaces by focusing locally or on niche markets

For the moment, though, we're betting on Trip Advisor to survive, though the best play they have is to buy out Yelp at some point in order to compete on a more level playing field with Google. Google, meanwhile, came to the app game a little behind, publishing their Places app less than a month ago, and they are going to have a much more difficult road making Google Places the ubiquitous ratings app with Yelp! and TA already established and downloaded.


But who would bet against Google?


Ever use a review site? What do you like and not like about them? Let us know at hgimayfaire@gmail.com! 

Our experienced management staff is always glad to answer questions about hotels, flights, restaurants, or any related aspects of travel and tourism--leave a comment, tweet us at @hgimayfaire, or email us at hgimayfaire@gmail.com!