So What Do You Think?: Online Reviews of Hotels and Restaurants Flourish
New York Times
January 22, 2008

Many of the reader-generated reviews of hotels, restaurants, destinations and other travel services on the Web may have started their lives as independent blogs by travel buffs. But they have consolidated into major online businesses, taking an ever-growing piece of the market from print guides. The major sites are TripAdvisor.com, owned by Expedia, and IgoUgo, owned by Sabre Holdings, which also owns Travelocity. Mr. Kaufer [of TripAdvisor] argued that online sites have advantages over written guides, including the fact that the Internet reviews are often more immediate and tend to be punchier than guidebook listings. Like IgoUgo, TripAdvisor has a core staff of employees and also employs specialists who "have a nose for sniffing out fraud and who literally read every review." Both sites also use filters to discourage spam messages. And both are working to make it easier for users to simplify, index online or print out specific information for individual needs on a trip. Mr. Kaufer said he initially worried that the reviews on the site would be overtly negative. "I thought, why would someone typically write a review other than they had a horrible time and they needed to vent," he said. The opposite happened. People generally like to share good travel experiences, even if they tend to toss in caveats, he said.