first. Your experience...
first. Your experience on TripAdvisor—again, this was initially, when we
launched the site—was very fulfilling, because the information we found was
always spot-on. We didn’t always have something, but what we had was always a
match.
Jumping forward in time as the site grew, all of a sudden now those hundreds
of thousands of articles are dwarfed by the user reviews that our visitors
have generated. It’s fresher information and tends to be more detailed. To
many people, it’s more reliable.
There’s a whole other theoretical discussion of, “Would you rather read a
review about a hotel by Aunt Mary you’ve never heard of from Bloomingdale,
Indiana, or from Frommer’s, the trusted guidebook brand?” And the follow-up
Stephen Kaufer 363
question is, “Would you rather read 20 reviews from people you don’t know, or
1 review from Frommer’s?” Near as I can tell, most people, when given the
choice of only one piece of information, will take the Frommer’s—even though
they might be suspicious it’s a little old or a little vague. But when you have 10
or 20 reviews, and you have a half a dozen written in the past couple of weeks,
you know you’re getting an unvarnished and up-to-date version of what you’re
looking for. And colorful.
Livingston: Were the people originally gathering all this content TripAdvisor
employees, or were they contractors?
Kaufer: A combination.
Livingston: You said it took a couple years to populate the site. Did you launch
the site before it was fully populated?
Kaufer: Oh yeah. We started in February 2000, and in October 2000 we
launched the site, but it only covered the United States. Over the course of the
next 2 years, we rolled out the rest of the world geographically. Of course, we
were always adding more and more content as we found it. When we launched,
if you picked the 20th hotel in our popularity index in Boston, there might have
been one or two articles about that hotel, which is a heck of a lot better than
none, but nothing compared to what we have now.
Livingston: How did people find TripAdvisor when you first launched?
Kaufer: When we started TripAdvisor, the notion was TripAdvisor.com was
actually just going to be our demo site, because we never planned to appeal
directly to end users. We were going to be selling this rich database to travel
portals, online travel sites. They would be querying our database to find the
best information and surfacing it to their users, and there would be a little
“Powered by TripAdvisor.”
Because we would have the richest database of travel information, our hope
| ← Kaufer: We tried | was that it → |