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This is horrifying behavior. I'm certainly not going to use TripAdvisor again. The most depressing part of this story is the sheer number of comments alleging
by generj 9y ago
This is horrifying behavior. I'm certainly not going to use TripAdvisor again.
The most depressing part of this story is the sheer number of comments alleging sexual abuse TripAdvisor deleted. I was expecting this article to slim with about two to three allegations. The fact that USA Today could find so many people to corroborate this sort of behavior shows that TripAdvisor is making a deliberate choice to sexually and physically endanger their customers.
- AJ007 9y agoIf Google penalized or delisted TripAdvisor, they would go out of business.
- tacomonstrous 9y agoWould be very hard for them to do that without inviting serious antitrust scrutiny.
- i_am_nomad 9y agoHow, though? It doesn’t seem like they compete with TripAdvisor. Their “Google Reviews” product isn’t in the same class at all.
- lepht 9y agoGoogle Trips seems pretty close to me: https://get.google.com/trips/ https://get.google.com/trips/
- notahacker 9y agoAnd their standard search/mapping product returns lists of hotels/attractions on a map with star ratings, unique and syndicated reviews, photos, opening times and availability & price with booking link.
- user5994461 9y agoGoogle has the initial search traffic for hotels/planes/cars. They could capture most of it with the commissions instead of directing to the well known comparative sites. It's a very hot topic between Google and the travel groups.
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- shostack 9y agoIs there any public data on how much of TripAdvisor's revenue comes from Google organic traffic or paid search traffic from AdWords? I'm guessing a considerable amount, but I try not to make assumptions about these things, particularly for large brands that likely get a significant amount of referral and direct traffic at this point in their maturity.
- user5994461 9y agoAbout zero revenues I'd say. Travel companies pay Google for the ads. It's not unusual that the referral costs as much as the margin earned from the customer. Thus the sale can have a zero or even negative value for the travel company, it will only make money from that customer if he comes back later. Your assumption was misplaced. The good question should be how much money does Google make from TripAdvisor? The answer is that they will lose a lot if they stop referring them.
- shostack 9y agoIf they are expecting to make a loss on the initial transaction, but make it up from LTV, I would be absolutely shocked as a marketer if they were not baking that into the equation when determining whether a given channel was profitable for them.
- user5994461 9y agoOf course they do check for profitability. There are quite a few interesting stories about that actually. For instance, if a channel consumes the vast majority of the margin, that's still a valid channel. The advertiser could depend more on you than you depend on him.
- ivanhoe 9y agoI don't know the details of the story, but couldn't it be just a glitch in their automatic filtering system? Happened to all of us at some point, you try to fix one thing, but accidentally screw up something else in the process.
- generj 9y agoIn this case, the filtering happened by TripAdvisor staff and "trusted community members" with mod power. But the article also mentions "hundred of filters". I imagine that the filters flag comments and then the 300 staff TripAdvisor has to ensure the reviews are legit manually review them. It's possible some sort of automatic filtering glitch has occurred, but this has been an issue since at least 2010. The company is very much still responsible.