Articles tagged “ugc”

Booking sites' guests reviews on Google have been a highly charged issue for years. The latest is that Airbnb and TripAdvisor are willingly giving Google their guest reviews of vacation rentals, but they are busy figuring out how not to give away the store in the process.

Many Airbnb hosts of the mom-and-pop variety — yes, there are a few left — feel aggrieved when they welcome guests into their homes and have to bear the consequences of hostile reviews penned with the worst intentions. Airbnb is trying to tip the balance back toward hosts — and is probably making neither party totally happy.

If you think protest is futile, then you're wrong. Petitioners didn't think TripAdvisor went far enough to promote traveler safety, and they got the travel website to take stock of itself and make additional reforms.

TripAdvisor's treatment of sexual assault allegations at hotels will not please people who would like to see these properties' listings pulverized. But for those travelers scoping out hotels for issues of concern, these feature changes are a modest, incremental, and positive step.

TripAdvisor still isn't crazy about Google emphasizing its own travel businesses ahead of those of competitors. Still, in the wacky world of online travel marketing, metas will advertise in other metas when the financials work in their favor. User experience? It isn't always the best.

Two deals in the space of a week show how serious Skyscanner is about improving the content it offers to customers. The days of it being a pure price-comparison site are definitely over.

This is a decent exit for the investors in ReviewPro and a wake-up call to a Western hotel industry ignoring China's tech scene. But it is also a validation of ReviewPro's particular approach of giving hotels actionable analytics on guests for sales and marketing, and revenue management -- and not just monitoring TripAdvisor ratings.

Google has fought and annoyed TripAdvisor and Yelp for years when it comes to user reviews. The search giant obviously has the scale to compete and is now putting new emphasis on its own user reviews, but it has to prove it has the focus to upend the review balance of power.

Let's be clear: Not all hotel guests and review-writers are angels. But the solution is not dodgy hotel contracts and taking punitive actions against customers. Business owners, as well as consumers, should remember the wisdom of the crowds is pretty good at protecting from one-sided and impure reviewers.

If Google is using the "wisdom of the crowds" to determine how it arranges restaurant information in search results then in a lot of ways it believes professional reviews, and especially those from its Zagat franchise, trump user reviews. But when it gets down to displaying the text of diners' reviews, Google unfairly believes that its own consumer reviews are the fairest of them all.