For Trip Advisor, launching of a flight search tool was like all great ideas 'an obvious thing to do'.

In his interview with Philip Wolf, CEO of PhoCusWright Inc at PhoCusWright@ITB, Marc Charron, managing director, Europe, for Trip Advisor said, "We already have a trip planning resource. We've made our name in hotels. We've enriched the content to include restaurants. Fights are key to trip planning. We needed to offer a holistic experience for trip planners and we needed a compelling air experience."

He said that it took less than a year to go from idea to execution. "We had a team to focus on it and to build relationships with OTAs and airlines."

Asked if launching a flight search tool would corrupt Trip Advisor's DNA which was user generated content, Charron said that the idea was to expand the notion of what Trip Advisor is. "We want to be known as a travel planner, not just hotel reviews. We want to be your essential go-to resource in trip planning."

He said that air fare search was also not new to Trip Advisor, which is owned by Expedia Inc. "The company has an appetite for meta as can be seen from its various acquisitions and it's totally different from the OTA experience. We felt we could do something unique in this space by combining it with our brand."

Asked if he thought other OTAs would respond with meta-search, he said he couldn't speak on their behalf "but it fits us and our media model and our aspirations".

He agreed there was inherent conflict in the online media model juxtaposed against unbiased information but "the beauty of the model is, the better you for for the customer, the better your referrals to your booking partner".

"The successful of our financial model is parallel with the customer proposition. Our independence is our bread and butter."

It was also obvious at this juncture that the case of the Yasawa Island Resort & Spa in Fiji would come up in the conversation. Following an investigation sparked by a story in Travel Trends, TripAdvisor – Where Truth Is A Matter of Opinion, the site removed dozens of reviews on the hotel.

Wrote Martin Kelly in his follow-up story, "Most notably, it removed every positive review (three stars or more) of the 10 posts between December 1, 2008, and January 10, 2009.

"This was a period when there were massive discrepancies between the reviews – people apparently either loved or hated the place. The average rating of those 10 original reviews was 3.2 stars. Following the removal of every positive review between those dates, just four remain with an average rating of 1.5 stars - a huge difference."

TripAdvisor spokesman Luke Fredberg wrote in an email to Travel Trends: "We respond and act upon every report of potential bias that we receive from both our member and hoteliers, and are constantly refining our fraud processes based on that feedback.  I wish I could go into further detail but this obviously would compromise our privacy policy and reveal proprietary information."

On the possibility of matching search results by different customer parameters, Charron said, "The more people tell us about themselves, the more we can do that. I don't know how automated it needs to be though.

"It is an ongoing challenge, we get 20 million reviews and opinions, how can we do more personalization?"
One way, he said, was to expand its profile pages and give people more prompts. "But you can't classify people that easily. We are not one person, not one mood, when we travel. So we have to create flexibility and give control to the reviewer."
Charron also said interest in user generated content was universal. While the French tended to have higher contribution rates and Germans were more skeptical, the growth in UGC has been exciting.
"We launched in India in August and it's a fun market. It's early days yet but we are seeing a high contribution rate. Booking a hotel online is a fairly new experience in India, people are more used to booking airlines.
"There seems to be a lack of trust and we hope to fill that gap."


Web In Travel  2009 will be held from Oct 20-23 at Suntec City, Singapore. This year's WIT will comprise The WIT Conference (Oct 20-21) and The WIT Ideas Lab (9-11am, Oct 22 & Oct 23)

www.webintravel.com