TripAdvisor: The New Bully on the Travel Information Block?

In my last few years of European guidebook research, it’s increasingly impossible to ignore a new power on the block: TripAdvisor. Many guidebook mainstays have faded, and now small hotels and restaurants can be made or broken by their TripAdvisor rankings. While I am still committed to finding, evaluating, and listing the best hotels for my travelers in Europe, I expect that in the future, fewer people will rely on guidebook listings for their hotels and more will use online services.

I never even visited TripAdvisor.com until a few months ago. Considering the power it wields over so many of my hotel and restaurant friends in Europe, I was curious. It is, admittedly, an impressive collection of reviews from travelers. But anyone can submit feedback, and my hunch is that a significant percentage of them are by friends of enemies of the place being reviewed. I find more and more small hotels offering a free breakfast to people who promise to write kindly about them on TripAdvisor. Conversely, several hoteliers have told me that occasionally guests threaten them with a bad review unless the hotel gives them a deep discount.

I also have serious doubts about TripAdvisor’s restaurant rankings, which reflect the tastes of tourist reviewers rather than local foodies — and therefore skew toward glitzy, obvious places rather than good-value, authentic, hidden alternatives. (If you’re not convinced, see how your favorite restaurants in your hometown stack up on TripAdvisor.)

While it can be helpful to look over TripAdvisor’s hotel and restaurant listings, I wouldn’t rely on them blindly. On the other hand, I’ve found the most helpful categories are those listing tours, sightseeing experiences, and entertainment. When in Salzburg, I clicked around the TripAdvisor reviews to survey the many little outfits doing Sound of Music tours. And from TripAdvisor, I learned that the big shot who owns Red Bull (the energy drink) has an ego-boosting space at the Salzburg Airport (called “Hangar-7″) where he displays his hot cars and fancy personal airplanes, viewable by the public for free.

For me, the most interesting dimension is the huge impact TripAdvisor and other Web booking services are having on hotels all around the world. Hoteliers in Europe have told me they see all marketing these days as two branches: publicity (traditional ads) and recommendation (TripAdvisor). They know that a good TripAdvisor ranking can make their business — and a few bad reviews can sink them. They’re awed and terrified by the power of this one website.

As “recommendation marketing” becomes the dominant force, powers in that arena are jockeying for position. The rise of TripAdvisor goes hand-in-hand with the new power of booking services like Booking.com, Venere.com, Hotels.com, and Expedia.com. All of these services pay to have a link on TripAdvisor. That way, when people search hotels on TripAdvisor, they simply click through to reserve — not directly with the hotel, but through the booking agency (which the hotel must pay a commission).

If you own a small hotel needing to rent rooms via the Internet, you now feel like things are out of your control. To be listed by any of these services, hotels are pressured to pay fees, additional fees for good placement and photos, plus even more fees to allow travelers to book rooms directly. A “parity clause” requires hotels not to advertise or sell rooms for less than the price promoted on these booking sites. While a few hotels refuse to be controlled by online booking services (and don’t play the Internet booking service game), most find it’s the only way to stay in business.

I’ve talked to hoteliers who are trying to migrate to Facebook, where they can sell rooms outside of the booking-site commission racket. To get around the “parity clause,” they are creating clubs where members can get “fan rates.” Even if this works for them now, the hotels fear that Facebook is just waiting for them to do the hard innovation work…and then Facebook will come in, co-opt the business, and extort their own charges and fees. (By the way, Europeans trying to get into the social media swing find Facebook viable for reaching American adults, while it attracts a younger clientele in Europe.)

Now Google is getting into the mix and positioning itself to be the default way to book a room. Hotels report that Google is dropping by to film 360-degree views of their places. European hoteliers told me they worry that Google may soon threaten to make everyone play by its rules for placement in searches.

In short, European hoteliers tell me that if you’re an investor, pull out of TripAdvisor and invest in Google and Facebook. That’s where they predict the next power will reside.

So, in a nutshell, as a community of travelers, we are enjoying new recommendation and booking services — but, whether hotels like it or not, we are all paying 20 percent more than before for our accommodations. This money is not going to the hotels, but to Internet companies.

What’s your take on Trip Advisor as a source of information for your European travels? Have you enjoyed good experiences through TripAdvisor, or do you find the rankings biased? When you book a hotel, what do you find the best method?


Source: http://blog.ricksteves.com/?p=8248

Tripadvisor Data Scraping

Being able to market a product to people who are interested is one of the main goals of advertising. There are a few different ways to do this. Some of these methods are very effective and some are not as efficient. But when you find the right way, that is very effective, you make that a core in how you do business. One popular method of finding future prospects for businesses is called web scraping.

Web scraping services are becoming an important resource, once companies realize all of the benefits associated with this method. Imagine if your company was in the business of selling trip advising services online. It would be great, to have email addresses, webpages, access to discussion forums, about people who are interested in trip advising, talking about trip advising etc. The power of what data scraping can do for companies is amazing.

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There are many companies that can offer trip advising scraping, but many of them do not live up to their claims. Most of them of them say they can give you good data for a cheap price. But in most cases they are offering low quality data, at a very high price.

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Source: http://thewebscraping.com/tripadvisor-data-scraping/

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With growing demand, companies like 3i Data Scraping have designed and manufactured various tools that can help in product website scraping task. Using these tools, the entire process of data scraping has become automated and users can get the desired results in quick amount of time. The extracted data is generally in the CSV, HTML or excel format.
Significance of product screen scraping

In certain cases, data analysts and business users are looking to scrape the entire web page from various websites. Using the screen scraper tools that are available at 3i Data Scraping , people can go for product screen scraping process. This process can be used to take a snapshot of the entire screen and scrape the screen data from the web pages and then use that data in the offline format. Every year, millions of users are going for product screen scraping process owing to the number of advantages they can derive out of this. Information that is extracted can be easily saved in the screen format.
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Data extraction can also be extended to extracting information related to the products and their features., For instance, people who are looking to find out details about the competitors products such as the color, size, shape, price, features, benefits etc can use the scraping tools that are listed at 3i Data Scraping and get the desired output in a format as specified by the user. Sometimes, marketers are interested in knowing the details of the products. In such a situation, product content scraping process would prove to be the best.

Source: http://www.3idatascraping.com/scrape-product-details-from-ecommerce.php

The Uses Of Web Scraping Services

In only 2 decades, the World Wide Web has become a vast repository of knowledge. As the Web continues to expand, information stored in it becomes more difficult to get and utilize. While there is no arguing that search engines are really beneficial, all they can do is locate information and guide you to it. You as the user still have to scan the content until you find what you are trying to find, highlight and extract that information. With the inherent limitations of search engines, individual users and companies who wish to extract information from the Web automatically make use of Web data extraction or scraping.

What is Web data extraction or scraping? This state-of-the-art software gathers data from the Web and places them into files for an end user. It carries out a more sophisticated function than search engines since it can work around HTML code. These extraction tools automate the scanning and extracting of information that make evaluating accumulated information easy for the person or company using the tool.

Farming methods There are three strategies utilized by these extraction programs. The first strategy is Web content farming and this is focused on collecting preferred content, for instance HTML files, pictures, or electronic mails. The second strategy, Web structure harvesting, makes the most of the fact that web pages can offer more information than simply their apparent content. Case in point, links can supply information on a page’s reputation or give give you an idea on the assortment of topics covered in that page. The third method, web usage harvesting, provides an insight to user behavior. It also assesses the effectiveness of the website’s construction.

Possible Uses These services have become a significant resource for firms specifically those that advertise their goods online. By means of extraction tools, companies will be able to pull together information on rivals, from pricing structure to other essential data. For instance, if you run a travel booking company, you can make use of TripAdvisor harvesting tools to gather email addresses, and relevant content from web pages and online forums, as well as people who take interest in creating and reading trip and accommodation suggestions.. Through the help of these special tools, you can obtain and assess data that can help you formulate marketing strategies that are more effective.

There are plenty of providers of Web farming services, but some do a finer job than others. Don’t choose the first one that offers their services. The company that offers the cheapest package is also not always the best option. Investigate on their reputation and ask for references before making any commitments.

Web harvesting services can be very helpful because data you can collect through them will allow you to develop marketing campaigns that are targeted, and thus effective. To know more about web scraping and web harvesting, you can tap here.

Source: http://shopukstyle.com/1351/the-uses-of-web-scraping-services/

Note:

Delta Ray is experienced web scraping consultant and writes articles on linkedin email scraping, linkedin profile scraping, tripadvisor data scraping, amazon data scraping, yellowpages data scraping, product information scraping and yellowpages data scraping.