TripAdvisor is no stranger to the travel trade but did you know that it started life above a tiny pizza parlour called Kostas in the town of Needham, Massachusetts, USA in February 2000, writes Peter Corcoran.
Sixteen years later and TripAdvisor has grown to become the largest and most popular travel website in the world. It has a highly engaged community posting comments, answering questions, uploading images and giving feedback to hoteliers, restaurateurs and hospitality industry operators.
However, it is not just a single website but in fact the TripAdvisor group owns 23 other travel websites. These include AirfareWatchdog, Jetsetter and Virtual Tourist. TripAdvisor branded websites get in excess of 350 million unique visitors per month combined and the company now operates in 47 countries worldwide in 28 languages.
The real success of the brand has been its user-generated-content business model and how wildly successful this has been. For example, 2,600 new topics are posted by users across the TripAdvisor forums daily and more than four out of five questions that are posed in the English-speaking forums get answered within hours!
The user-generated-content model has also enabled users to upload more than 46 million images snapped by themselves to the site.
For a visual illustration of the power of TripAdvisor today in 2016 and a look at where it began, view this infographic created by SunSearch Holidays.
About the author: Peter Corcoran is the Owner and Director of SunSearch Holidays, based in Dublin, Ireland, where he has been organising travel arrangements for his customers for the past 20 years. He regularly creates content such as infographics and storymaps on topics around the wider travel, tourism and hospitality industries. www.sunsearchholidays.ie
