Articles tagged “yelp”

The recent hurricanes have put Waffle House's opening hours (24/7/365) back into the spotlight, but it's the restaurant's logistics and enduring hospitality practices that deserve the story.

The recent hurricanes have put Waffle House's opening hours (24/7/365) back into the spotlight, but it's the restaurant's logistics and enduring hospitality practices that deserve the story.

With several other restaurant-facing product offerings, Eat24 was the one that didn't fit into the Yelp puzzle. By ceding delivery to former rival, Grubhub, Yelp is free to focus on the other parts of its business that certainly benefit from its robust consumer network.

While investors and observers are rightfully focused on how TripAdvisor's transition to a hotel booking site will work out, the company has some meaningful hedges in the form of vacation rentals, tours and activities, and restaurants. Collecting monthly and annual fees is a very material part of the overall business and will likely become even more so.

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.

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.