News last week that TUI Travel is launching its own user review and recommendation site across mainland Europe indicates yet again that large travel companies are keen to get their hands on unique content.
TUI’s new Cheqqer service is interesting in that it is planning a two-tiered approach to getting content – starting from the bottom up in terms of attracting new reviews to the platform and also aggregating reviews from TUI’s myriad of brands.
Nothing wrong with that, except that two years is a long time in the world of user generated content and those with longish memories will recall how TUI’s Thomson division bought the well regarded (and well-SEOed!) Holidays Uncovered site in September 2007.
At the time, Holidays Uncovered was seen as Thomson’s – and by extension, some said, TUI’s – route into UGC.
But in an almost simultaneous move as that of buying HU, Thomson signed a deal with the omnipresent TripAdvisor to run its reviews into the main Thomson website.
To say there was a degree of confusion in some quarters would be an understatement, but an organisation with the collective brain power and expertise of TUI would clearly know what it’s doing, so the most were content to wait and see.
Roll on two years and, as Sandra Leonhard, TUI’s director of web strategy and business development, says – TUI is starting over again with a new review and UGC brand.
Leonhard says probably quite  rightly that the Cheqqer brand image wouldn’t be appropriate for, say, Thomson’s bucket and spade holidays and therefore throwing Cheqqer as a brand its own right into the UK mainstream market is unlikely.
However, when pressed on what happens to the Thomson site given that it has TripAdvisor reviews and its own review system already, but the TUI mother ship is creating a major new review site in Cheqqer, Leonhard muddies the waters a bit.
Thomson could, it turns out, quite feasibly have reviews streaming in from its TripAdvisor partnership, Cheqqer AND its own reviews. Yes, three review and recommendation systems on one site.
And this still doesn’t answer the question (“it’s a Thomson issue, not TUI”) as to what happens to all those Holidays Uncovered reviews.
Three does seem a bit like overkill especially if they are all UGC. Difficult to compare when they all come from different systems and potentially have differing audiences.
Much more valuable to users to have the customer, the provider and an industry expert review for each product.
The UGC model that they’re thinking of following is finally starting to come apart. It’s no so much how many UGC providers can you have on one site. It’s more about having UGC that people will trust. TUI will probably take another 2 years to work that out and be behind the curve again.
Looks like they have a plan;
“Leonard suggested there is more user-generated content on the web than published content and argued: “Search engines struggle to find relevant content within reviews because of the way this type of content is generated.”
“She said cheqqer.com would be built using an open application programming interface (API), allowing developers to build cheqqer applications. “The commercially viable user-generated content sites have an open API,” she said.”
Coming from the Travolution interview…
Just to clarify a few points here – we’re certainly not “starting again”. A TUI Travel PLC initiative, Cheqqer Beta launched in the Netherlands in June 2009 – the website combines UGC and published content with the aim provide 1m hotel & destination reviews by Q1 2010. Cheqqer Beta is a portal for user-generated content that will be developed to generate recommendations rather than just offer reviews.
In the UK, as you rightly point out, we feature both Thomson customer reviews and syndicate in TripAdvisor reviews to Thomson.co.uk at an accommodation level. By providing independent reviews, integrated into the Thomson site, we’re demonstrating confidence in our product. This gives customers transparency through independent reviews, negating the need to leave the site. Touching on a comment from Rainbowsurfer, we want to provide customers the choice of reviews as our own research shows they trust some over others.
And yes in the UK we also manage Holidays Uncovered as an independent business and revenue stream. Its heartland is in the beach package market, which is where the bulk of the Thomson programme operates. As such it also acts as an effective marketing channel for the product.
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