Trip Advisor: The More-the-Merrier Importance of Sharing

“You can’t win if you don’t play.” So say the lottery people, but it’s not that far off, too, when it comes to information-sharing travel service sites. You want to play to make it work.

There are lots of sites where travelers share knowledge, experiences and advice but TripAdvisor.com is the best for me. I use it on every trip I take. Every one, large or small.

It’s so simple. You want to find a hotel in New York City, say. Or Angra do Heroismo on Terceira island in the distant Azores. You Google around, you Kayak and Travelocity and Hotels.com your way through all the choices. You compare prices. You look for bargains. But, ultimately, how do you know whether the place is any good? Is it really a bargain if the place is a dump? How do you know? Try TripAdvisor.

Thousands of people file our travel observations on things to do, hotels and other information. Like pennies put in the jar at the end of the day, in time this adds up to a pretty serious amount of value. But for it to work well, it needs us to make our contributions as well as to check in on it.

Consider: The other day I went to Angra do Heroismo on Terceira island in the distant Azores. Booking a hotel, I chose the Angra Garden (admittedly, there aren’t a lot to choose from — that’s why you go to Angra do Heroismo on Terceira island in the distant Azores.) But when I looked at the TripAdvisor accounts, I saw the place was getting some pretty tepid reviews. Nothing awful, but lukewarm, Well, I thought, I’ll take my chances; I’m not looking for the Ritz.

When we got there we found the hotel to be totally terrific. It has a perfect location smack on the little town square. the rooms were lovely, the staff helpful. Everything was clean and professional.

The point? Some one or two people either had outrageously higher standards or had a bad visit and because so few people commented, they dominated the accounts. It’ll happen on any of these service sites that cranky people will make disproportionately loud observations. Or, on the other hand, that fans or even employees of the hotel will praise it to the heavens. That makes their comments as random as stopping strangers on the street; worse, because they control the flow of information.

So I contributed my two-bits, letting TripAdvisor visitors know there are other experiences to take into account.

Earlier I did the same thing on the Warwick Hotel in New York City, a place that worked well for me. There, hundreds and hundreds of people had made their views known already so that you had a better picture to study, the extremes were lost to the larger mass of opinion. That’s the way it works. My positive observations didn’t change the overall (positive) assessments of the place, but it shaded and endorsed the others.

It’s always a little of a dice-roll but knowing the odds the rules and others’ experiences greatly increases our chance of winning.

TripAdvisor is now working with Facebook to hone in comments between people who are “friends.” The idea is that we will feel more comfortable with the opinions and experiences of people we know. I’m not sure I buy that, since it automatically limits the pool to a smaller number, defying the TripAdvisor strength entirely, but we don’t need to use that aspect of the contribution.

So, if you’re planning a trip, take the easy extra step of checking what other people have found. At trip’s end, take the time to share what you found. It makes the thing work.

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