UPDATE:
TripAdvisor hired John Dila to head the team as director of customer care on March 2 2011. Dila joined from crowd-sourcing startup InnoCentive and had previously worked at eBay.
ORIGINAL POST:
TripAdvisor is building a global customer care operation for members and hotel owners.
Spokeswoman Emma O’Boyle says details will be available soon about a customer service unit under development.
O’Boyle made the statement in response to a published report that TripAdvisor was considering setting up a hotline which hotel owners could use to get faster action from TripAdvisor concerning troublesome hotel reviews.
“Our Owners Center remains the most efficient way for business owners to report suspicious reviews,” O’Boyle said, adding that details would be forthcoming about a customer service unit.
Although TripAdvisor isn’t ready to detail plans for the customer service unit, it is currently advertising for a director of Customer Care for a customer service and call center in its headquarter city, Newton, Mass.
The job description calls for the Customer Care director to “lead the implementation and administration of TripAdvisor’s Customer Care operations. The primary objective is to build a global team of exemplary customer service agents dedicated to delivering a superior customer experience for TripAdvisor’s member and owner community.”
The job description notes that the director would be charged with “hiring and managing a global team of customer service agents.”
A hint about the global nature of the operation comes from TripAdvisor’s preference that the new-hire be proficient in French, Italian, Spanish or German.
TripAdvisor has never had a customer care center for consumers and hotel owners, but introducing call centers might make sense given the company’s development of Business Listings for hotel and vacation rental owners and any other new business to business operations currently under consideration.
Some hotel owners long have complained that TripAdvisor has been slow to respond to their concerns and perhaps offering a toll-free number for such issues could make a difference.
The development also occurs as a legal action by hotels against TripAdvisor has been threatened.
Nice PR. Too little too late for a company that lost its integrity the moment it sold out to Expedia?
Probably
Matt: I don’t think a company builds a global customer care operation for “PR.” Although a minority of reviews may be problemmatic, TripAdvisor still provides a very useful service to consumers. I use it all the time and find value in it. It’s not the be-all and end-all, but a useful service.
“…Tripadvisor still provide a usefull service to consumers…”(!)
DO YOU HAVE A CRYSTAL BALL TO DISTINGUISH REAL GENUINE REVIEWS FROM FAKE ONES?
@Matt @Dennis
Personally, I think that we should always take reviews and recommendations from places like TripAdvisor and Amazon with a pinch of salt.
Some reviews don’t tell the entire picture!
Alla Dolce Vita: Sadly, I don’t believe in astrology and crystal balls. However, TripAdvisor has ways — albeit imperfect — of detecting fake reviews.
And, consumers can readily understand that a review that paints a property as too good to be true, will understand that something is amiss with the review.
If there are 20 reviews of a property — or 200 — forget the real good ones and real bad ones and understand that the ones in the middle probably are the most credible.
There is wisdom in the masses.
Very good Dannis, naither do I!
please read this: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/travel/news/article6583450.ece
What do you think?
To offer RELIABLE content , a good clear editor should always check the content which intends to publish and ALWAYS avoiding anonimous reviews…do you think EXPEDIA-TRIPADVISOR is a clear competent and ethically correct editor?
Do you know that Expedia OWNS Tripadvisor?
….what kind of “wisdom” is supposed to work when the information puiblished as being reliable, are NOT linked to a real ID and above all ARE NOT LINKED to a REAL PAID BOOKING followed by a real holiday spent in the Hotel / B&B ?
@alla – you’re in danger of trotting out the same arguments again.
And, of course, we know that Expedia owns TripAdvisor. Not only have we written the very same for years and years, but you always like to remind everyone in your comments.
Hallo Kevin,
sorry you are right, but I was giving this information to Dannis, trying to understand how the supposed “wisdom in the masses” could work without knowing some common and “general” information, more known from the expert of turism market.
Cheers
Alla Dolce Vita
Alla: I have been writing about TripAdvisor since it was founded. So, yes, I have an idea it is owned by Expedia.
I think your problem is that you don’t trust the opinions of regular people, i.e. travelers. The beauty — yes, the beauty — of TripAdvisor and other hotel review sites is that they took review power aways from the “experts” and handed some power to regular people.
TripAdvisor has thousands upon thousands of reviews. If a hotel has 200 reviews, do you think the majority are fakes? Or might there be some wisdom and insight in them from ordinary travelers.
I have used TripAdvisor reviews to decide which hotel I might book and have seldom gone wrong with, yes, “the wisdom of the masses.”
@Dannis
what do you think of the article published by the times on line?
The only problem is that I CAN NOT see “beauty” in Tripadvisor
A “beautiful” information source HAS to be reliable: I don’t want to read lies or misleading advertisments and like me, I think, are the famous “masses”.
Sorry, but I think that NOBODY is be able to distinguish the real reviews from the FAKE POSITIVE and NEGATIVE reviews.
I love reading reviews when useful to make the right choice BUT…a review has a value when true and coming from a real traveller after a real holiday, don’t you think?
I don’t know how many on 200 reviews could be FAKE…but this fact makes the whole information unreliable…don’t you think?
…and think about the fact that Tripadvisor decides what to publish… sorry to wake you up from the dream that Tripadvisor is a reliable info-source!
PS and if still in doubt I will suggest an easy experiment to ascertain this fact.
Sunny greetings
Alla Dolce Vita