Hotels may either love TripAdvisor or loathe the company, but certainly they have to pay attention to it.

And, TripAdvisor has figured out a way for the lodging industry to get even more involved.

In a bid to further engage those 450,000 hotels under its microscope, TripAdvisor was to introduce today, across all its global websites, a free, English-language ReviewMetrix dashboard for hotel owners that includes a new Customer Satisfaction Index, as well as charts to compare a hotel’s CSI over time against a particular competitor and hotels in that city as a whole.

Native language versions of the tool, for TripAdvisor global websites where the prevailing lingo is not English, will be coming “very soon,” a spokesman says.

In essence, through a partnership with Market Metrix, which provides the dashboard and data analysis, TripAdvisor is leveraging existing assets –  travelers’ sentiments on a variety of issues as already expressed in their reviews — and using data-mining techniques to aggregate them into this new benchmarking tool.

Think of it as TripAdvisor slicing and dicing already available data and packaging them in a way that makes it easier for hoteliers, at their daily or weekly strategy sessions, to analyze what travelers are saying about them and also the competitor around the corner.

And, it won’t hurt TripAdvisor if the hotel’s CSI is a frequent discussion topic at these strategy meetings.

While consumers can view a hotel’s TripAdvisor Popularity Index to gauge its standing within a city and can see the property’s overall Traveler Rating, the ReviewMetrix dashboard is for hotels only and goes a few steps further.

Unavailable to consumers and accessible to hotels from each property’s owners’ resource center, ReviewMetrix digs deeper into the data and gives hotels an additional way to see how they measure up against competitors.

The CSI culls each hotel review and rates it from 0-100 based on the following categories: overall, value, recommended by traveler, cleanliness, service, room and location.  

The dashboard also displays the eight most recent reviews of a property, indicates whether they are leisure- or business-travel-oriented reviews, and breaks down how each review ranks the categories.

For example, the ReviewMetrix may show that the most recent review of a Marriott property gave it three stars out of five for cleanliness, four stars for value, and a CSI of 86 out of 100.

And, by clicking a “change” link on the dashboard, the Marriott can view – one property at a time – how it measures up to the Hilton or InterContinental property down the street, along with hotels in the city as a whole.

While a lot of travel-industry folks – some uninformed – complain that hotels are ill-equipped to respond to user reviews which they feel are fake, inaccurate or, in some cases, insightful, the ReviewMetrix, in its “Manage most recent reviews section,” includes a link to existing  TripAdvisor “respond to a review” functionality. Management responses, when published on the consumer area of TripAdvisor websites, appear under the review in question.

While ReviewMetrix is available for free, Market Metrix also is offering premium versions, for monthly fees ranging from around $40 to $60, which offer the ability, among other features, to further customize the tool and provide alerts.

Apparently some companies have been data-mining TripAdvisor reviews without authorization and marketing them to hotels. With its weekly TripAdvisor feed of review data to Market Metrix, TripAdvisor is trumping those efforts.

Nathan Clapton, TripAdvisor’s vice president of partnerships, says the debut of ReviewMetrix can be viewed as part of TripAdvisor’s evolving relationship with hoteliers and other travel sectors.

“This is us, I feel, doing something quite useful for the hotel base,” Clapton says.

And, I have to interject that better relations and more traction, won’t hurt the bottom line, either.

As we all know, TripAdvisor has taken a lot of guff from the lodging industry over incidences of fake reviews and hotels manipulating the review system to up their rankings. After all, how a hotel fares on TripAdvisor has serious financial repercussions.

And TripAdvisor, as it successfully expands around the world and leads parent company Expedia Inc’s advertising/media efforts, has been very reluctant to alter its consumer-review procedures despite periodic outcries.

ReviewMetrix doesn’t do anything to alter TripAdvisor’s free-wheeling hotel-review policy, where anyone can write a review of a property without little vetting of whether the individual actually tried to book or actually stayed at the property.

But, TripAdvisor, through increased outreach to the hotel industry along with the introduction of ReviewMetrix and other improvements to the owners’ resource center, is seeking to further engage with hotels and to improve the foundation of their interactions.

For example, Clapton points out that TripAdvisor now routes and sorts communications from properties about disputes and other issues through the owners’ resource center, which gives TripAdvisor the ability to be more responsive. Instead of sorting through thousands of hotelier e-mails from Gmail or Hotmail addresses, for instance, TripAdvisor now can quickly identify the hotel that communicated an issue and can better sort the various types of inquiries.

Meanwhile, TripAdvisor’s efforts to leverage existing content on its sites, as it is doing with ReviewMetrix,  is an ongoing effort.

I wrote in July 2009 how TripAdvisor created Family Vacation Critic in its own image by repackaging a lot of existing TripAdvisor content for a family vacation and advertising audience.

In that regard, Clapton says that TripAdvisor is considering ways to compile and utilize existing trend data about restaurants, flights and vacation-rental properties, among other segments.

Consider some of TripAdvisor’s ammunition: Through its Local Picks on Facebook application, launched in late 2007, TripAdvisor attracts a ton of consumer reviews of restaurants. So TripAdvisor is pondering ways to use this relatively untapped resource.

Says Clapton, referring to restaurant and other non-hotel review data: “We always are looking at new opportunities, but we probably haven’t fully formed the ideas yet.”

Thus, there may be additional types of TripAdvisor dashboards and websites in the travel industry’s future as TripAdvisor hones its metrics system.

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