Thursday, February 08, 2007

TripAdvisor quietly unveils video tools

TripAdvisor chief executive Steve Kaufer told us last year that the site would start introducing some major new features in 2007 - and users are starting to see a few of their plans.

The latest one is very interesting, but appears to have been introduced without any PR push just yet.

Registered users can now upload their own videos to the site or browse others based on a tagging system that ensures either hotel, destination, restaurant or local attraction is assigned to each clip.

[Hat tip: Hotel-Blogs, which has gone through the process of uploading one of his own clips]

The move is a significant one, even if - we suspect - TripAdvisor is actually waiting for a bit of volume before making an official announcement

The top-rated video, for example, has been voted for by just 178 users so far [this will no doubt increase].

Other handy features include a reasonably high upload limit of 100MB per clip, which is the same as YouTube.

The introduction of videos comes just a week or two after the launch of the MyTrip functionality, allowing users to save pages and individual reviews for later viewing.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Very smart. You've got to hand it to Trip Advisor, they really know how to produce some decent tools.

What will be interesting is if Expedia gets itchy again.

Travolution Blogger said...

MLF: Good point. The Expedia-TripAdvisor issue has actually died down a little bit.

We recently asked Expedia what had happened to the negotiations that were rumoured to be taking place between them and TripAdvisor to integrate content.

We got a very simple "no comment to make" to every question we asked.

Source for the original story here

Anonymous said...

I wonder if for those OTAs who have missed the train on the User Generated Content, there will be some opportunities for TripAdvisor to white label their content...

Guillaume
www.hotel-blogs.com

Anonymous said...

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Travolution Blogger said...

Anonymous: off-topic.

alice said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Travolution Blogger said...

淑丽 (twice): spam, irrelevant to the conversation.