Incorporating UGC into the meta-search flow
Published: 24 Aug 2009
IN-DEPTH: trivago’s MD Malte Siewert on meta search + UGC
Existing and emerging travel search and discovery applications have been looking at ways to reduce “unnecessary” browsing time.
The focus is now on delivering the most relevant product option with the most relevant reviews. There are quite a few applications, mainly start-ups, that allow consumers to search and get customised results based on their trip preferences. These sites have worked on travel ontology to structure unstructured reviews, descriptions and other content, and perform attribute and sentiment analysis of the reviews to understand the intent of the content’s author.
Travel meta-search and hotel review sites have proved their worth, too. While meta-search engines offer on-site dynamic filtering, sorting, and selecting of travel inventory from multiple retailers, hotel review sites provide unbiased advice about a very subjective and disaggregated product category.
The market in the US has already witnessed quite a few exciting developments. In order to know more about Europe, EyeforTravel.com’s Ritesh Gupta spoke to Malte Siewert, MD, trivago.
Siewert, who is scheduled to speak at Social Media in Travel Strategies Conference 2009 to be held in Prague (October 13-14), spoke about various issues including monetising social media. Excerpts:
The industry is witnessing initiatives related to offerings, which combine the power of unbiased meta-search and user generated content. The focus seems to be on delivering sophisticated collaborative filtering and recommendation engines that depend on individual tastes as well as recommendations. What do you make of such initiatives?
Malte Siewert: New travel search projects try to suggest the ideal hotel for a certain customer type. They try to establish more individual search modes in contrast to telling generically the best rated hotel in an area or category. The latter approach is boring but until now has also proven to be a reliable one. Review sites’ success stories are not based on their advertising model, which most people find annoying, but rather they’re based on the fact that the hotel selection works relatively well. To establish a new travel search model in the market, one has to use UGC in a way that improves upon the generic approaches. This can be achieved in two ways: by either analysing UGC semantically; or by passive networking in the amazon-style, that is by saying “Someone who liked this hotel, also liked this one” and the like.
In online travel, most advertisers are focused on driving transactions versus branding, so a CPC or CPA strategy makes sense. From trivago’s perspective, how do you think the combination of meta-search and UGC paves an avenue for monetising social media?
Malte Siewert: trivago’s approach is straightforward: UGC drives qualified traffic which then is redirected to e-commerce sites. This approach has proved to be a successful one for a number of UGC-sites. The business case is a different one for social network sites that are communication-driven and have already found or need to find other means of monetisation like subscription fees.
Flight search continues to be a strong category for meta-search because the price-comparison orientation of these sites is well suited to the commodity nature of air travel. Lodging is still a significant portion of a vacation spend. How do you think hotel meta search engine is shaping up as of today?
Malte Siewert: Flight meta-search is more accepted than hotel meta-search. There is not really a good reason for that. By and large people in Germany think that hotel room nights are priced like cigarettes and cost the same from wherever you buy them. However, especially in Europe, this is mostly not true. The reasons for the price discrepancies for hotel rooms are the fragmented hotel market (especially in Europe) and the various distribution models. Only a meta-search site can help you overview the variety of hotel OTA’s, suppliers and their prices. More and more people will realise that in the course of time.
How do you think UGC can be incorporated into the meta-search flow and make sure customers make the best possible use of UGC-meta search engine joint offering to get closer to the booking or evoking an action from them?
Malte Siewert: Users searching top down; e.g. for hotels in a city, region or certain category find aggregated content more useful than for example unique description texts. Therefore, it is key to extract the essence of the UGC and display it in a standardised comparable format. Overall user ratings or hotel categories based on user experience are some examples. The further a user drills down to a certain hotel the more unique and extensive the information presented shall get. This holds true for pricing information too. Whilst we would not present rate description on top level we would do so when a user checks prices for a specified hotel.
Sites like trivago and TripAdvisor offer hoteliers tools to manage their online presence and engage the community just when the community is searching for the most relevant information. Can you provide an insight into how this offering has shaped up in terms of community size and how have hoteliers benefited from this?
Malte Siewert: Since we launched the hotelier service there have been more than ten thousand hoteliers who have registered and provided content to trivago. A number of these actively encouraged guests to submit reviews to trivago. So far these initiatives are very promising as the number of leads we now drive to these hotel’s homepages has increased by three to seven times. Hoteliers benefit from more reviews on trivago because they get more traffic directed to their websites and that translates into direct bookings. trivago benefits because we receive new members and content.
When trivago gets traffic on its hotel search engine or UGC pages, how do you present hoteliers an option to engage with the audience? Do you charge premium for this?
Malte Siewert: The hotelier who registers for the service can directly react to traveller reviews by leaving his own comment next to the user’s opinion. He can engage into a dialogue with his guest and use the feedback to improve his service. There is no premium charge for this. It will help travellers understand the character of a hotel and guide them to better travel decisions.
Different travel search engines have different strategies – for instance it varies from transaction focus versus multi-phase focus and listing revenue focus versus advertising revenue focus. Considering that trivago has a combination of travel meta-search engines and UGC, how do deals with clients differ from typical meta search engines?
Malte Siewert: trivago’s deals with clients are the same as with the usual meta-search engines, since we incorporate both models. Depending on the stage at which the client wants to go for advertising, we offer the full range of business models, CPM and CPC.
Social Media in Travel Strategies Conference
Malte Siewert, MD, trivago is scheduled to speak at Social Media in Travel Strategies Conference 2009 to be held in Prague (October 13-14) this year.
For more information, click here:
http://events.eyefortravel.com/sales-and-marketing/conference/social-med...
or contact:
Gina Baillie
gina@eyefortravel.com
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