TripAdvisor improvements + monetization ideas

1. TripAdvisor.com
New Features &
Monetization
Veeranna A Y, IIM Ahmedabad

2. Table of Contents
PART 1: 3 New Features .......................................................................................................................... 2
Feature Name: MedCritics .................................................................................................................. 2
Feature name: Travelogue .................................................................................................................. 3
Feature name: Detailed review ratings .............................................................................................. 4
UI Mockups ............................................................................................................................................. 5
Feature: MedCritics............................................................................................................................. 5
Feature: Travelogue ............................................................................................................................ 7
Feature: Detailed Review Ratings ....................................................................................................... 9
Blog Post ............................................................................................................................................... 10
Feature: MedCritics........................................................................................................................... 10
Feature: Travelogue .......................................................................................................................... 10
Feature: Detailed Review Ratings ..................................................................................................... 10
References: ........................................................................................................................................... 11
Part2: Monetization .............................................................................................................................. 12
Additional Revenue Stream: Cruise Lines Booking ........................................................................... 12
References ............................................................................................................................................ 13

3. PART 1: 3 New Features
Feature Name: MedCritics
Description: Now find reviews of various medical tourism destinations across the globe. We care for
your health & strive to provide best reviews.
Rationale:According to the OECD report on medical tourism websites, Underpinning the search and
interpretation of sites are the fundamental issues of how trust and credibility of information are
established and maintained given there are limits of choice and a great deal of uncertainty and
information asymmetry when potential medical tourists make decisions around treatments,
providers and destinations. The fine line between editorial content and advertising of online sites
does not help assuring informed choice on the part of the patient.
It’s commonly found medical tourists wants to be private &anonymous.
So the need of the hour is to provide trusted yet anonymous reviews on medical destinations across
the world inorder to help user’sbetter plan their medical trips.
Goal: To be part of the medical tourism ecosystem as an online website platform providing trusted
reviews on medical destinations.
How to achieve the goal:
Adopt review generating model same as for hotels & restaurants with attributes relevant to
medical tourism.
Trust & credibility factor is taken care by reserving the right to reject a review by
TripAdvisor. Taking into account the owners reply.
Summarizing the opinions by aggregating the user ratings over a time inorder to give a
popular opinion & reduce noise.
Use nicknames to maintain anonymity of users.
Attract new ads related to medical tourism
Feature scope: The scope of the feature is to include reviews on Medical destinations like hospitals
& alternative treatment centers catalogued under medical conditions/procedures.Reviews will be
under a new section of TripAdvisor.com website. To keep both reviewers & owners in loop while
building trusted reviews.
User Acquisition:The global medical tourism market was valued at $10.5 billion in 2012 and is
estimated to reach a market worth $32.5 billion in 2019 at a CAGR of 17.9 percent from 2013 to
2019, according to a new market report published by Transparency Market Research. Every year,
about 7 million people grab their passports and fly abroad looking for quality, affordable medical
care(Source: Economic Times). In the year 2012, 2.6% (170,000 visits) of total foreign inbound tourists to
India was for medical tourismpurpose (Source: http://tourism.gov.in).
Therefore there is a huge potential in acquiring these users onto the TripAdvisor platform.
User Engagement:Average time spent looking for information on medical travels is supposed to be
more than that of leisure travels due the seriousness & direct impact on individual.Hence it can be
stated that user looking for medical destination reviews will spend more time in the website than
others.

4. User Retention: Medical tourism is a one time or limited time activity. Hence longer association of
users to the website is not to be looked at primarily, instead increased referrals made to other users
should be the strategy for user re-engagement.
Metrics: No of medical destinations covered across the globe, Growth rate of medical destinations
added every year, new active users acquired every year, average no of reviews per medical
destination, average ratings of medical destination.
Feature name: Travelogue
Description: One stop destination to share your entire journey. Browse through various travel
stories to plan your own memorable story.
Rationale:Currently reviews are broken up into hotels, restaurants, rentals and attractions. A user
after completing their travel has to navigate into each of these sections individually & write separate
reviews for the hotels, restaurants or attractions they experienced. A user planning their travel has
to again navigate into each of these sections individually scanning the reviews and customizing their
trips. If you look at the consumer behavior of tourists, one of the U.S. Travel Market Behavioral
Studyconducted by Canadian Tourism Department says that 64% of users get their information from
Internet, 36% from Friends & relatives, 32% from guide books. So can these three be combined so as
to give a one stop destination for trip planning?If we look at each of these sources, internet gives
information in a segregated way, friends & family give information of their entire trip, and guides
give information which is a free form of travel literature with subjectivity.
Travelogue is in the middle of these three types of sources providing semi structured & opinion
normalized travel stories of travelers across the world.
Segregated reviews:
Internet websites
Travelogue
Complete Experience:
Family & Friends
Not a entirely segregated reviews
A complete picture of a trip
Subjectivity removed due to large no. of travelogues
Subjective Reviews:
Travel blog posts
Feature description & scope:Let’s say a traveler has been to a destination for 5 days & within these
5 days he/she has been to 3 hotels, 7 restaurants & 5 attractions. Currently the traveler has to write
3 hotel reviews + 7 restaurant reviews + 5 attraction reviews separately inorder to share his entire
trip. The scope of this feature is to reduce the amount of cross navigation time in writing reviews
and provide a single page where the reviews can be shared in a semi structured way as opposed to a
blog post (free form writing).Visiting users will be displayed the travelogues& will be aware of the
combinations that worked for various travelers.

5. Goal: Give users an account of entire trip along with reviews of a traveler so that proper planning
can be done by looking at various travelogues. Travelogues will give a real combination of
experiences that worked well or not.
How to achieve the goal:
Add a new review segment i.e. Travelogue
Since the travelogues will be in a semi structured way the individual segments of reviews of
hotels, restaurants etc. can be accessed independently also. So these reviews are shared
among travelogues& other review segments.
New travelogue rating which represents how well this combination works. It is assumed that
users who read these travelogue will also rate them by comparing with their trip.
Attract new tour packages & tour guides related ads
Metrics: No. of travelogues, growth of travelogues, no. of ratings per travelogues, average rating per
travelogue, averagetime spent writing a travelogue, average time spent on the website, growth of
reviews, no of reviews per user
Negatively impacted metrics: time spent on website, time spent in writing reviews
These will be negatively impacted because of the centralization of the review writing process which
should now take less time. But on the contrary users may write more reviews due to the ease of use.
Previously user may drop out in the middle & not write reviews for their entire trip due to
navigational difficulty.
Monitoring the metrics no. of reviews per user vs. time spent writing reviews per user will tell the
impact of this feature. Expected impact is no of reviews per user should increase while time spent
writing reviews should decrease inorder for this feature to add value to the website.
Feature name: Detailed review ratings
Description:Now get the summary of the latest ratings & trends in reviews. Ratings will no longer
reflect entire diluted history of ratings but will give detailed information so that you can judge
better.
Rationale: For example MTR Lalbagh, Bangalore has 94 excellent, 109 very good, 44 average, 13
poor & 4 terrible reviews as a total summary. Now this information is not very rich in detail. The
restaurant might have improved in recent times but inorder to be visible it has to wait until
significant no of positive reviews overtake the previous track record. But a year wise break up of
reviews will tell how the restaurant is performing recently also showing the trends in the ratings.
So currently there is only one dimension of quality (excellent, very good, average, poor & terrible)
while we will be adding a second dimension time (in last 12 months, between 12-24 months, once
upon a time etc.)
Goal: To give an overall picture of the hotel, restaurant or attraction in detail so that it reflects the
true current scenario. Current scenario is what is relevant to the user instead of past performance.
How to achieve the goal:
Display year wise break up of ratings instead of total aggregated summary.
Minimize the display window by keeping a scrollable window to showcase year wise ratings.

6. Use relative dimensions (last 1 year, 12 – 24 months before etc.) instead of calendar years
(2013, 2012, etc.)
Links to specific year wise reviews
Feature description & scope: The feature will only display the year wise break up and not show any
other metrics like growth rate etc.,
Metric: User satisfaction rating
Negatively impacted metrics: Average time spent in a reading a single review. No of reviews read
per visit.
If user get satisfactory information easily, he/she will move on to reading another review. So a
balance between average time spent readings a single review vs. average no of reviews read per visit
should be maintained inorder to for this feature to be valuable.
UI Mockups
Feature: MedCritics
Mockup 1: Review Page
Mockup 2: Review Creation Page

7. Process Flow:

8. Feature: Travelogue
UI Mockup 1: Review selection page

9. UI Mockup 2: Storyboard for Travelogue

10. Feature: Detailed Review Ratings
Current Ratings Display:
Proposed Yearwise Ratings Display:

11. Blog Post
Feature: MedCritics
Are you planning to visit a foreign country for medical treatment? Are you looking for
reliable & trusted first hand opinions/reviews on various options? Are you fed-up of
browsing through a large no of medical tourism provider websites & not finding trustworthy
information? Do you want to write a review on your recent medical trip to a medical
destination? Well look no further. We at TripAdvisor are launching MedCricitcs, a new
medical destination review segment written by medical tourists all over the globe.
MedCritics works similar to our other review offerings on Hotels, Restaurants, Attractions&
Holiday Rentals.We put extra effort to make the medical reviews more & more reliable and
trustworthy, because we care about your health.
Browse through our vast collection of medical destination reviews & make an informed
choice on your medical trip.Our reviews will give you firsthand information on costs,
facilities, medical procedures available and doctor ratings of various medical destinations
across the globe.
Also if you want to write a review we understand your privacy concerns & keep your name
and personal information private and instead use the nickname provided by you.
Currently our vast review database contains reviews from 25 countries with a total count of
200,000 reviews on 10,000 medical destinations written by 5,000 medical tourists.
Feature: Travelogue
Whom do you talk to when you plan for a trip? Do you talk to your family, friends, look up in
Internet, Visit travel blogs? Are you able to chalk out an itinerary with less effort? We at
TripAdvisor understand your difficulties in planning a trip. Hence we bring you Travelogues,
a successful/unsuccessful itineraries or combinations of things that travelers have
experienced across the globe at various destinations.
Travelogues will provide you a firsthand traveler’s itinerary which worked for them & rated
by other travelers. So next time if you are planning a trip look at our vast Travelogues who
knows you may like one of them or build your own itinerary looking at them.
Travelogues unlike our other individual reviews on hotels, Restaurants, Hotel Rentals &
Attractions are a combination of these reviews which a traveler has written to share their
entire trip.
Reviewers can now write travelogues & share their entire experience in one go.
Feature: Detailed Review Ratings
Attention Users!!! We are changing our review ratings display feature to bring you a richer
and more relevant information on Hotels, Restaurants, Hotel Rental and Attractions.Current
review ratings display feature gives an aggregated summary of the entire available ratings

12. on that Hotel, Restaurant, Hotel Rental and Attraction. We realize that things change over
time & the most relevant information is available in the most recent set of data. Hence we
bring you Detailed Review Ratings which summarizes these ratings year wise.
Owners will be at peace now as ratings reflect their recent performance. And by not mixing
the bad & good reviews written once upon a time to their recent performance we try to
provide relevant information to users.
References:
http://www.academia.edu/4774406/Medical_Tourism_Market__Global_Industry_Analysis_Size_Share_Growth_Trends_and_Forecast_2013_-_2019
http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-06-27/news/40233610_1_medicaltourists-weight-loss-surgery-health-care
http://tourism.gov.in/writereaddata/CMSPagePicture/file/marketresearch/publications/Indi
a%20Tourism%20Statics(2012)%20new.pdf
http://en-corporate.canada.travel/sites/default/files/pdf/Research/Marketknowledge/Consumer-travel-trade/US/US_Travellers_Summary_Report_en.pdf

13. Part2: Monetization
Additional Revenue Stream: Cruise Lines Booking
Cruise Tourism is also a form of tourism which is prevalent among luxury tourists. Some of the major
cruise tourist destinations are Caribbean, Europe, Australia and South East Asia. According to Cruise
Lines International Association, Europe in 2012, 21 million passengers booked cruise ships
worldwide and is growing at 10% annually.
TripAdvisor currently taps into the flight booking market by providing leads to other flight booking
websites. And generates revenue through pay-per-click model.Similar revenue generating model can
be adopted to tap into cruise lines bookings.
Revenue model: Pay-per-click ($0.70 per click, average cost of pay-per-click in TripAdvisor)
Strengths: Huge TripAdvisor traffic to generate bookings to cruises.260 million unique monthly
visitors.
Partners:Cruise booking sites such as MakeMyTrip, CruiseDirect, StarCruises etc. to redirect traffic to
their websites.
MarketingStrategy: Direct Selling to online travel booking websites.
Functionality to be built: New tab for cruise booking on similar lines as hotels & flights should be
built
Metrics: no of clicks per day, no of successful transactions per day, no of cruise searches per day,
conversion rate of searches
Monitoring: If the above metrics are not performing well, investigation should first begin in the
usability & user experience part of the website section. Later on, no of options generated through
searches. Inorder to improve these metrics, make the website more user friendly & partner with
some more cruise booking websites to provide sufficient options to users.
3 year revenue estimation calculation:
20 million cruise bookings in 2012
23% of these bookings were online 2012 = 4.6 million bookings through online
y-o-y increase in online cruise bookings = 10%
Assume that click getting converted into action is = 5% (internet average)
Therefore total no of visits to booking sites = 92 million in 2012
2013
101.2
2014
111.32
20%
22.264
2015
122.452
25%
30.613
0.7
0.7
2016
134.6972 Million Visits
30%
Travel Site share %
40.40916 TripAdvisor share
vol
Millions
0.7
PPC rate $/per click
10% growth

14. 15.5848
21.4291
28.28641 Revenues Million $
References
http://www.cruise-norway.no/viewfile.aspx?id=3824
http://www.cruisemarketwatch.com/articles/travel-agent-trends/