TripAdvisor Launches Cruise Metasearch to Tap Into a New Revenue Stream
Skift Take
TripAdvisor is smart to try to tap the ad budgets of cruise lines and online travel agencies with a relevant new price-comparison search tool. But many first-time cruisers may feel too overwhelmed by all of the review content given all of the complexity in booking a cruise.
TripAdvisor upended the hotel sector by persuading travelers to post reviews of their stays online. Now, the company is asking them to look to it first when researching cruise vacations.
After years of collecting ship reviews from avid cruise-goers on CruiseCritic — a forum that TripAdvisor acquired in 2007 — the online travel company has amassed a body of such user reviews. The company is using that as a base for TripAdvisor Cruise, a collection of reviews and search tools that it hopes consumers will visit as habitually as many travelers visit the site to read hotel reviews.
The company has begun offering price comparison search for 70,000 cruise itineraries in the U.S and UK. Cruise lines such as Carnival, Royal Caribbean, and Norwegian are participating as advertisers, as are online travel agencies like Expedia, Cruise.com, and Priceline. They are buying advertisements via the metasearch format that TripAdvisor uses.
TripAdvisor also debuted pages that profile every cruise, even for cruise lines not participating in its metasearch. The so-called Ship-tinerary pages include a mix of content culled from cruise lines and user-generated content, such as reviews and photos, to help consumers research their trips.
Notably, shoppers compare cruise deals by clicking links that send them off to sellers or re-sellers, rather than book while remaining on TripAdvisor’s interface. The company appeared to be betting that by not competing with cruise operators to “own” the customer, its new metasearch offering will appeal to cruise operators looking to drive consumers directly to their sites an
