Hotels beware: Tripadvisor meets Facebook

Home Hotels beware: Tripadvisor meets Facebook

It’s March, the month where spring is supposed to fall in. Time to think about where to go this summer. It’s going to be Italy: Tuscany and the Garda Lake. A few years ago I took a travel guide and I based my choice on the resorts that had the nicest pictures of the pool. This often turned out in a deception: the pool was not even half as big as it seemed on the photo and my pink bikini turned green of all the chemicals. Not to even mention the bad food they served. So, I know better now: Tripadvisor. If it didn’t exist already, one should invent it.

For every hotel I book, I check Tripadvisor.com and check all the reviews of people who visited the hotel before. If the overall opinion about a hotel is bad, there’s no way I’ll book it.Every day, about 500.000 people visit Tripadvisor.com. There are over 40 million honest travel reviews and opinions from real travelers around the world. 98% of topics posted in the Tripadvisor Forums are replied to within 24 hours. The only one lacking behind often appears to be the hotel itself. Apparently, those hotels still make money by fooling people.

Recently, Tripadvisor and Facebook decided to collaborate in order to enable people to book holidays based on trip advice of their friends. The new easy TripAdvisor’s interface will allow you to select any location from the map and read the experience of your friends who have been using the “Where Have You Been?†FaceBook app. TripAdvisor’s partnership with Facebook is part of a growing effort by the travel industry to tap into Facebook’s formidable base of 600 million-plus members.

More and more people seek information via other people, real travelers. Nobody wants to be fooled. But will this really mean the end for those obscure hotels I once booked because the pool pictures looked that great?