I have been doing a lot of study on the so called ‘Travel 2.0’ the trends and happenings. I thought I should share my thoughts on the topic for whatever it is worth.
User Generated Content (UGC as it is called) is something that I have been coming across fairly consistently. Analysts have been raving about it. Companies have been built around it. Everyone and Anyone wants to provide a facility for the user to write his bit. They say this is what Travel 2.0 is all about - collaboration and sharing and participation and any travel enterprise that is not in this can expect to be completely driven out of business.
One thought that keeps puzzling me is are there enough users to write that much of content? If we look around we are inundated with sites which offer us a chance to write our views, opinions, maintain our travel journals, give reviews and the like. Just to name a few - TripAdvisor, IgoUgo, Yahoo Travel , Lonely Planet and many more. Each claims to have millions of site visits and is filled with UGC (or so they say). TripAdvisor is supposed to have more than 10 million reviews, 6 million+ unique visitors and about 1.4% of visitors have written reviews (src: Compete Inc ). And this is just one of the sites. Apart from this you now also have the booking sites like Expedia, Orbitz, airlines (SouthWest), hotels (for ex: Sheraton) soliciting UGC. And you have many more just waiting to jump on the band wagon.
One thing is sure. Any prospective tech savvy traveler today likes to understand what others are saying about a place , a hotel or a flight , tips , tricks , regulations etc. and the web is the only place where such information is freely available. But how do we sift through the masses of content and find what is useful. Can we trust the content that is available? Normally we come across widely diverse opinions. “Loved it!”… “Hated It ..!” Glowingly written content about a specific service may be ad spiel from the service providers themselves. A very disgruntled post may be some kind of extreme frustration in an exceptional situation or the case of a competitor bad mouthing the service.
It makes sense to take all reviews with a grain of salt. A scathing review, with no other writers complaining may be a one off case. Conversely a glowing review in the midst of complaints could be bogus. Some sites are taking measures like allowing users to rate posts. On some sites like IgoUGo, the editors do the rating. Certain others like Boo use algorithms like IP checks to prevent multiple reviews form a single source. On Expedia only travelers who booked their stays through the site may comment upon a hotel. TripAdvisor has this concept of trusted reviews where a user can choose to read reviews from his or her trusted friends.
Semantic search seems to be emerging as a possible solution, where the retrieval of data is not just based on key words but on comprehending the text, resolving the ambiguities in the language and retrieving relevant content. We have seen Microsoft acquire Powerset and Twitter acquire Summize to be part of this new avenue.
Recently a semantic travel search site (Uptake ) has also been launched which claims to aggregate hotel reviews written in more than a 1000 sites and collate the content and rank the hotels. The site says that it is strictly about aggregation of reviews and semantic analysis and doesn't actually do any booking. Incidentally this site has been launched with the intent of helping a traveler not be overwhelmed by the information available and help the job of making travel decisions easier!
But the question is- is this enough? Again can we trust the source of data? For a traveler it is better to get a balanced picture by speaking to trusted friends, talking to travel agents, visiting multiple sites and finally leaving something to chance.
User Generated Content (UGC as it is called) is something that I have been coming across fairly consistently. Analysts have been raving about it. Companies have been built around it. Everyone and Anyone wants to provide a facility for the user to write his bit. They say this is what Travel 2.0 is all about - collaboration and sharing and participation and any travel enterprise that is not in this can expect to be completely driven out of business.
One thought that keeps puzzling me is are there enough users to write that much of content? If we look around we are inundated with sites which offer us a chance to write our views, opinions, maintain our travel journals, give reviews and the like. Just to name a few - TripAdvisor, IgoUgo, Yahoo Travel , Lonely Planet and many more. Each claims to have millions of site visits and is filled with UGC (or so they say). TripAdvisor is supposed to have more than 10 million reviews, 6 million+ unique visitors and about 1.4% of visitors have written reviews (src: Compete Inc ). And this is just one of the sites. Apart from this you now also have the booking sites like Expedia, Orbitz, airlines (SouthWest), hotels (for ex: Sheraton) soliciting UGC. And you have many more just waiting to jump on the band wagon.
One thing is sure. Any prospective tech savvy traveler today likes to understand what others are saying about a place , a hotel or a flight , tips , tricks , regulations etc. and the web is the only place where such information is freely available. But how do we sift through the masses of content and find what is useful. Can we trust the content that is available? Normally we come across widely diverse opinions. “Loved it!”… “Hated It ..!” Glowingly written content about a specific service may be ad spiel from the service providers themselves. A very disgruntled post may be some kind of extreme frustration in an exceptional situation or the case of a competitor bad mouthing the service.
It makes sense to take all reviews with a grain of salt. A scathing review, with no other writers complaining may be a one off case. Conversely a glowing review in the midst of complaints could be bogus. Some sites are taking measures like allowing users to rate posts. On some sites like IgoUGo, the editors do the rating. Certain others like Boo use algorithms like IP checks to prevent multiple reviews form a single source. On Expedia only travelers who booked their stays through the site may comment upon a hotel. TripAdvisor has this concept of trusted reviews where a user can choose to read reviews from his or her trusted friends.
Semantic search seems to be emerging as a possible solution, where the retrieval of data is not just based on key words but on comprehending the text, resolving the ambiguities in the language and retrieving relevant content. We have seen Microsoft acquire Powerset and Twitter acquire Summize to be part of this new avenue.
Recently a semantic travel search site (Uptake ) has also been launched which claims to aggregate hotel reviews written in more than a 1000 sites and collate the content and rank the hotels. The site says that it is strictly about aggregation of reviews and semantic analysis and doesn't actually do any booking. Incidentally this site has been launched with the intent of helping a traveler not be overwhelmed by the information available and help the job of making travel decisions easier!
But the question is- is this enough? Again can we trust the source of data? For a traveler it is better to get a balanced picture by speaking to trusted friends, talking to travel agents, visiting multiple sites and finally leaving something to chance.
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2 comments:
User generated content is here to stay. This becomes a channel which will undermine the effect of advertisement.
Therefore, an enterprise has to rethink how and what to advertise.
First of all...A good blog :-)
Coming to the blog content...There is a wind going around saying that the Travel industry is slowly moving back towards the good old days of booking through Agents and MiddleMen. If thats the case does creating a good image of a Brand with some good UGC help the business?
P.S: Now that your first blog is done,may be you could change the name to something like "My two pound worth" :-)
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