At a time when TripAdvisor is coming under heavy fire over fake reviews and clients blackmailing hoteliers, a new type of review website, TripExpert, has launched. It hints at its competitor’s troubles in the tagline on its website: ‘Finally, hotel reviews you can trust’.
TripExpert doesn’t feature reviews from customers but instead aggregates expert advice about hotels from different media outlets. Each property is awarded a TripExpert Score that is based on reviews in leading travel publications such as Lonely Planet, Frommer's, and Travel + Leisure magazine. The TripExpert Score, a number between 60 and 100, represents the consensus of expert opinion about the hotel.
TipExpert Co-founder and CEO, Andrew Nicol, points out in a statement that user reviews have undoubtedly contributed to people making better informed decisions about how to spend their time and money. It has also led to increased incentives for everyone from restaurant owners to hoteliers to improve the quality of their products and services.
However, Nicol warns that aggregating user reviews does not always produce accurate results. “No one knows how many reviews on Yelp and TripAdvisor are fake. We do know that it’s easy and cheap to buy fake reviews.” According to Nicol, crowd-sourced opinions about hotels and restaurants are only useful if the reader has the time to read hundreds of reviews.
Nicol says he launched TripExpert because he thinks it is important for people to have an alternative to user reviews. “Our data comes from people whose job it is to review hotels. By aggregating reviews from 20 different publications, we produce a TripExpert Score that accurately tracks hotel quality.”
Although TripAdvisor refused to comment on ‘other businesses and their business models’, TripAdvisor Spokesperson, James Kay, told Tourism Update that the user website would continue to focus on its key goals of giving customers a voice and promoting transparency in the travel industry. “By reading lots of reviews you can quickly build up an accurate picture of a place, and it is this ability to tap into the wisdom of a huge travel community that makes a site like ours so useful.”
