Mar 2007

So Arthur Frommer (the guy behind Frommer's travel guides) is not a fan of "user-generated" comments. That's the type you see on sites like Trip Advisor and Travellerspoint, comments about hostels, tour agencies, restaurants and what-not else from regular, "casual critics". People like you (unless you are a professional travel writer). We even get those comments on Travellerspoint some times, as users grace our forums with reports of their wonderful/terrible experience at Hotel Wonderful/Terrible. According to Frommer, it all spells trouble (read his articles here and here).

Yes, it's possible for hotels to log in under a fake name and post wonderful reports about themselves or terrible reports about the hotel next door. Easy enough. We should be wary of ploys such as those.

But Frommer's issue with "user-generated" comments goes a little deeper.

They (people who post their comments) have been to London, let's say, once. They have stayed at exactly one hotel. Their stay might have been improved or marred by one incident, one staff member behind the front desk treating them with either courtesy or disdain. Based on such fleeting impressions, and with no experience of other London hotels or of the general standards of the city, our one-time travel writer explodes with either enthusiasm or indignation.

In the forums, I asked people what the they thought of Frommer's opinion. Would you listen to what a first-timer has to say about the hotel she/he stayed at? Or should recommendations be left to the professionals - those travel writing gurus such as Frommer who spend their lives roaming from hostel to hostel and then package it neatly in a guidebook?

Earlier today an advertiser was pointing at some stats in Alexa as a basis for advertising on a Tupela site. Now while I understand the need to try and get some idea of how popular a site is before putting advertising money in it, it really cracked me up because Alexa is known to be seriously flawed (plus, they didn't bother asking me if there was any validity to the stats or not).

This was illustrated even more when I was checking out some new features Alexa is now showing in its ranking of Travellerspoint:

1. the breakdown per country of where most users are coming from (here's a screenshot for TP)

and

2. the real cracker, where Travellerspoint ranks in each country in terms of popularity!

Yes folks, that's correct. In Norway, Travellerspoint is the 227th site in terms of popularity and even more impressive, in Australia only 298 sites are more popular than Travellerspoint!! Now I wonder, could that possibly have anything to do with the location of Travellerspoint staff???

Of course the numbers are fun to watch and do provide a broad sense of popularity, but it's important to realize how easily these are influenced by a few people who visit a site a lot! Now if only we could attract some more traffic from the States; perhaps we should set up an office there too?!