Although widely misunderstood by the travel trade, TripAdvisor’s range of new tools and features gives travel businesses increased control over managing their profile, responding to reviewers and encouraging more positive feedback and content.

This was message from TripAdvisor’s Head of Destination Marketing, Helena Egan, who addressed the E-Tourism Summit Africa in Cape Town last week.

She stressed that registration for owners of travel and tourism businesses is free. TripAdvisor offers owners a free platform to upload images of their property (photos and video) and to add content to their sites.

Anyone can post travel articles and participate in the forums, 90% of which are responded to within 24 hours. For example, for South Africa alone there are more than 19,000 topics and more than 118, 000 posts on Trip Advisor.  Traveller Forums can be display on business owners’ own website as well.

Egan said business owners could also sign up for email feeds to keep them up to date with conversations about their business and to facilitate a speedy response. “Do respond to reviews, but often the community self-regulates negative comments, because user-generated content is opinion and different people will have different opinions,” she explained.

She said TripAdvisor’s interface with Facebook provides personalisation and referrals. Consumers mainly want to see online reviews of products and services and more than 70% of reviews are positive.  The flight search tool has a functionality that enables users to get fee estimates on low cost airlines and enables them to rate carriers as well. About 10m mobile users in 140 countries monthly access Trip Advisor’s free Apple app.

Trip Advisor is the world’s largest social media site for travel and after Google is also the largest website that drives business to other travel websites.
It spans 30 domains, 21 languages, 50m plus monthly users, 20m registered members and 50m annual reviews.  South Africa’s domain on TripAdvisor comprises 1086 hotels, 1400 B&Bs, 812 self-catering establishments, 1451 restaurants, 883 things to do and is used by 2m users.