Articles tagged “yelp”

Yelp struggled outside North America, and is giving up on developing its business abroad. Competing against business listings from companies like Google and TripAdvisor has taken its toll on the company.

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.

Does a dramatic reduction in outbound traffic from online travel agency sites mean they are getting stickier or are they perhaps consciously retaliating against hotel-chain websites for direct-booking campaigns? Or is something else up?

Yelp's frustrating attempt to push users from the mobile web to its smartphone app has apparently paid off.

Travel brands must be conscious about how people express themselves online to provide a platform-specific personalized customer service.

How deep will the concessions be that the European Commission will be able to coax out of Google? And will the U.S. Federal Trade Commission be embarrassed into action?

Yelp's adding tours and activities' bookings highlights the mainstreaming of the sector but the way Yelp is doing this is modest and not a game-changer. Yelp hasn't acquired a tours and activities provider and isn't putting a lot of resources into in-app bookings, both of which rival TripAdvisor has done.

Indiana and Arkansas, which passed a similar law today, should call up Arizona and ask what happened when the travel industry began boycotting the state because of regressive laws.

Google was adamant that it needed to compete in local search and it didn't mind playing hardball with Yelp, TripAdvisor, CitySearch, and others to get its way.