TripAdvisor introduced Reviews at a Glance, a feature that enables travelers to easily find parts of hotel reviews that may be the most relevant to them.
For hotels that have at least 50 reviews, Reviews at Glance captures the most frequently used phrases in that hotel’s reviews and makes it easier for the user to read a variety of user comments about that aspect of the hotel.
The feature is available on TripAdvisor.com and TripAdvisor.co.uk.
Take, for example, the Bellagio Las Vegas, which has 4,396 TripAdvisor reviews.
Here’s the Reviews at a Glance summary for the Bellagio on TripAdvisor:
If you are particularly interested in a “lake view room” at the Bellagio, you can select that phrase in the Reviews at a Glance box and surf through 77 mentions of lake view room in hotel reviews of the Bellagio.
It streamlines the process for users and is a better alternative than reading 4,396 reviews.
TripAdvisor has been pretty good at slicing and dicing its content. It already broke down reviews, making them searchable as business reviews, couples reviews and family reviews, for instance, and Reviews at a Glance takes this segmentation to a new level.
However, I’ve asked TripAdvisor for some additional information about how it selected the “most frequent review phrases.” I’m interested in finding out whether they literally did that.
For example, I see plenty of instances of “very nice” in Reviews at a Glance for several hotels, but I have yet to find phrases like “very bad” or “never stay there,” even for hotels with poor TripAdvisor ratings.
TripAdvisor now tells me only that Reviews at a Glance uses a proprietary algorithm.
Still Reviews at a Glance indeed provides a service to streamline reading reviews.
And, that undoubtedly is an issue in trip-planning.
Consider that U.K.-based hotel-review startup Trip Elated says one reason it sees an opportunity for itself is because it believes “travellers are tired of trawling through a constant array of conflicting information and bad experiences” when reading reviews.
Well, user-review leader TripAdvisor thinks it has done something about the “tired of trawling” aspect of the problem.
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I guess ‘very nice’ is just one frequent keyword used in the reviews for this particular which TA has highlighted with a count. For a hotel with consistently bad reviews, ‘very bad’(if users used it) might show up. It won’t be same for every hotel.
I like this approach personally – bcos it highlights both the good and bad mentioned by other users under tags. Good move!
I think this is a huge development and goes along way to making TA more RELEVANT. I still want to see a lot more personalization, but this is a good step.
OpinionWell.com is another startup that lets you see through the clutter of hotel reviews. It is a lot more powerful than Tripadvisor’s feature, it lets find all comments for any hotel feature, see all comments for that feature and sort by positive comments first, negative comments first, or date.
http://www.opinionwell.com/HotelFeatures.aspx?KeywordId=15702&Keyword=service&HotelId=5548&SortNeg=0#SentencesStart