Social Media and Marketing

The challenge for Kayak in the hotel review category will be related to building up enough originally-posted reviews to be perceived as a credible resource.

Published: 18 Mar 2009

The challenge for Kayak in the hotel review category will be related to building up enough originally-posted reviews to be perceived as a credible resource.

Given the network effect and brand that TripAdvisor enjoys, this will be exceedingly difficult. Here’s why:

Based on data from similar sites and my own experiences, I expect .2% of the visitors to TravelPost.com write a hotel review. That’s only 1 out of 500 visitors. If you assume 20% of the 7.5m monthly visitors to Kayak go to the hotel category or TravelPost.com, that’s still only 100 reviews/day ( (1.5m * .2%) / 30). I think to really displace TripAdvisor, Kayak will need 2000 new reviews/day, which they can accomplish by increasing traffic or the review conversion rate. It’ll be hard for Kayak to increase traffic by 20x, but they should be able to increase traffic by 2x, and thus the review conversion rate needs to increase by 10x (2% of visitors write a review).

A great product experience - which I’m sure they’ll deliver - won’t get them this order of magnitude shift, nor will a strategy of aggregating review snippets from hundreds of sources. There are already a lot of sites that do a nice job at review aggregation, from UpTake to OpenList to Yahoo Travel and even TripAdvisor themselves. So here are some ideas to truly disrupt the hotel reviews space - mostly ideas that are too difficult, risky or expensive for TripAdvisor to attempt.

Recommendations for Kayak

Share the love. Develop a revenue share with users who write more than 10 great reviews - give them a share of Kayak Network CPC revenue that originates from the pages where their review appears. This model has worked very well to get user-generated content traction with HubPages and Squidoo.

Shock and awe. In the short term, to generate interest and initial content, give away $5m in the form of $5 vouchers for use when booking a hotel on Kayak in return for writing a high quality review. Assuming 80% breakage, this programme would only cost $1 per review (and the costs could be partially or fully subsidised by a supplier.)

Integrate with TripIt. As a tactic to better target the review subsidy, an integration with TripIt via their API could help make selective cash offers to pay users (who have stayed in a hotel that is lacking a recently-posted review) to write a new review.

Integrate with Facebook Connect. This way, users don’t have to create a separate TravelPost account to write a review (and also so the review is sent to their Facebook newsfeed when posted). TripAdvisor was a launch partner, but I cannot find the Facebook Connect implementation anywhere. Perhaps they pulled out for technical or strategic reasons?

Integrate more deeply with Kayak. This would help detect with a high degree of probability when someone has stayed in a hotel (based on tracking supplier leads), and remind them to write a review about their stay. This could be done on the home page for people when they return to Kayak after the stay, or via an email.

Expand TravelPost to flight reviews. This would take on the rather tired product experience at SeatGuru. 80% of Kayak’s traffic is to the flight category, and getting this passionate and loyal category of users to contribute content seems like a far lower hurdle to cross. In terms of flight-related content, there’s so many topics related to flying that have not been adequately captured online. How about reviews of pilots, food choices, entertainment options, bathroom cleanliness, time spent on the runway, time spent waiting for luggage, etc. They could get posting velocity traction here and convert the users to hotel review posters.

Or, perhaps TravelPost is a head fake meant to pull TripAdvisor into a defensive posture to protect its core business instead of invest in metasearch. After all, the most famous quote from “The Art of War” is that “all warfare is based on deception.”

It’ll be fun to watch this fight from the sidelines and focus on my own battle (and associated tactics of deception.)

(Contributed by Sam Shank, who was the original founder and CEO of TravelPost from 2004-2007. Now he is associated with hotel deals and packages site DealBase.com).

Related links:

A review of TripAdvisor’s gimmicky “fees estimator”

“Our subscribers are the perfect audience for Fly.com”

A review of TripAdvisor’s gimmicky “fees estimator”

How traffic trends make sense for TripAdvisor’s search engine?

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