TripAdvisor to Reinvent Travel Planning with a New Social Network
https://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/tripadvisor-lays-social-feed-site-partners/314958/
Later this year, TripAdvisor will launch a new social-media-style website and mobile app. This new approach to travel planning will allow users to create a personalized profile through which they can share photos and videos of their trips, and connect more directly with friends, family, and fellow travelers. As TripAdvisor’s co-founder and chief executive put it, “One size fits all becomes a personalized trip for you.”
Currently, TripAdvisor hosts hundreds of millions of reviews for hotels, restaurants, and other travel-related things. The problem with this is that not everyone likes to travel the same way, and sifting through thousands of reviews to find opinions from people who seem to share your tastes in travel can be very tedious. As a result, people usually only look at the “Most Helpful” reviews, which may or may not highlight specific aspects of the destination that are of key importance to their travel style. A more social approach to trip-planning will allow users to share travel advice and travel recommendations with more like-minded travelers, ultimately leading to more satisfying travel experience.
From a Networks class point of view, this new site presents the formation of a new kind of social network: one defined by the travelers, the places they go, and the activities they choose to do while on those trips. The new TripAdvisor site will allow users to gain followers and follow others. If we model these connections as strong and weak ties, with a strong tie representing two users who each follow each other and a weak tie representing one users following another with no reciprocal following, we can envision how a user’s feed might look: recommendations based on strong ties dominating the top of the feed, followed by recommendations based on weak ties, and further down the feed the occasional recommendation based on another group connected to the user by a nearby local bridge in the network. This is all mere speculation on my part, but regardless of how the algorithms of the new site work, it’s sure to be a more effective way for travelers to plan their next adventure.