If you’re one of the million-plus hotel, restaurant and/or attraction owners with a review listing page on TripAdvisor, then you’re in for a pleasant surprise. Because TripAdvisor just launched a new owners’ center (www.tripadvisor.com/owners), built to help management teams from hotels, restaurants and attractions manage and optimize their properties’ presence on TripAdvisor.

In a press statement, Nathan Clapton, vice president of partnerships for TripAdvisor, said that “Innovative leaders in the hospitality industry are searching for new ways to manage and market their businesses in today’s troubling economic times, so we’re helping them connect in more ways with our community . We give owners the tools to manage their online presence and engage the community just when the community is searching harder than ever for the most relevant information and the best values.”

Once owners register on the site, they can sign up for emails of any new review of their property as a simple customer relationship management tool.

It’s a quick transition over to engaging the community, with links to management response tools, as well as instructions for updating property listings, uploading videos and photos, and much more.

Not to make a big deal about it, but something tells me this is more than just keeping owners of listed properties happy. It’s a very useful set of tools for owners, no doubt, and makes it easier for TripAdvisor to maintain contact with the over 1 million owners who have have their own page on TripAdvisor. 

But that’s all secondary. The main reason for this new owners’ center is likely because  TripAdvisor is circling the wagons around it’s ‘assets’. Said assets being the millions of reviewers and the hospitality providers who get reviewed. And they’re circling the wagons because their safe terrain of hotel reviews is under seige from companies like Kayak and Yapta, who’re aiming to offer not only the hotel reviews, but also metasearch and lowest price finders.

End game here, as Yen Lee on the Uptake blog says, is that future will include “cracking the code” on price opacity on packages, deals and complex products; sorting through the parameters and choices on hotels; and deciphering the folksonomy used in the explosion of reviews and blogs – especially around hotels.

TripAdvisor is responding nicely to the pressure, and I suspect they have a few more aces up their sleeve. The problem, for Kayak and the other wannabes, is that it’s very dangerous to wake up a sleeping dragon. Instead of being able to muscle in on TripAdvisor’s hotel terrain, they could end up getting their clocks cleaned out on flight search by the big T.

Posted on March 21st, 2009 by PLing
Filed under: Travel News