TripAdvisor Redesign

TripAdvisor will fully realign its business-to-business division to encapsulate both the hospitality and tourism sectors, it was announced on Friday.

According to The Caterer, TripAdvisor claims that since the introduction of their ‘business to owner’ service back in 2010, their focus has been predominantly on working with hospitality business owners to leverage its success.

Five years on, they believe their goals and objectives have been fulfilled and are looking to refocus on including all hospitality and tourism partners.

They suggest that in doing so they will be able to offer further products and tools to support the entire hospitality and tourism industry.

TripAdvisor has pledged to continue offering its full online services to hospitality businesses through its Management Centre which is available to all organisations registered on TripAdvisor.

Alongside this, it will also remain dedicated to revenue support as well as Express Review and Content Syndication solutions.

Despite TripAdvisor’s justification for the move, there is a growing demand from hoteliers and Revenue Managers to gain more direct bookings from their own websites.

An abundance of tech start-ups have been quick to jump on this opportunity and have developed tools to support hoteliers in achieving their goals.

One example of this is Triptease. Established in 2013, Triptease has developed a number of digital tools to back hotels in reducing the power of OTAs, essentially strengthening the relationship between the hotel and the guest.

In addition to this, with content marketing becoming ever more critical, many hoteliers have turned to bloggers with large online audiences for reviews, driving traffic to their websites and creating the reviews they need.

Parallel to this, hotels have been using their own efforts and online agencies to craft content to bolster their search engine results, redirecting traffic to their own sites.

With alternatives on the up, there are only two questions left to answer; what new products and services are in the pipeline for TripAdvisor as they try to move forwards in the hospitality and tourism sector?

And how will these changes impact industry practitioners?

As the news unravels in the coming months, you can be sure we’ll keep you up to speed with the latest changes.