Kayak Co-Founder Paul English Is Launching New App as an Alternative to 'Garbage' Restaurant/Hotel Reviews
Skift Take
Dennis' Online Travel Briefing
Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, Executive Editor and online travel rockstar Dennis Schaal will bring readers exclusive reporting and insight into the business of online travel and digital booking, and how this sector has an impact across the travel industry.Serial entrepreneur Paul English is back again with a new app called Deets, and he's trying to disrupt the way people discover restaurants and hotels.
English, who co-founded both Kayak, which sold to Booking Holdings for $1.8 billion in 2013, and Lola, which offloaded its assets to Capital One in 2021 for an undisclosed sum, called Tripadvisor and Yelp reviews "garbage" in a Skift interview, and said he hopes to use natural language processing, AI and machine learning to summarize and streamline reviews personalized for each user in Deets. The tagline is "your favorite places."
He asked me to search Google for "buy Amazon reviews," and there were 41,000 results, meaning fake reviews are for sale. The same search for Tripadvisor generates 7,560 results and there are 14,300 for Yelp. On the review integrity front, Tripadvisor has a team to intercept fraudulent reviews, and its CEO believes its user reviews are
