TripAdvisor

Google launches new lead gen product as search bug quashes competitors

If questions lingered about Google’s commitment to lead gen, the world’s most popular search engine answered them this week with the launch of Google Compare for mortgages.

The service, which helps consumers shop for a mortgage from multiple lenders, was announced earlier this year and is now available in California. Google plans to launch in other states soon.

10 essential features for mobile travel sites

Looking for a break on a mobile? Gosh your commute must be especially arduous today.

Here’s some help: a guide to the most convenient features available on mobile travel sites, which could possibly help you find your way to pleasant pastures a lot quicker and also highlight some great design for other mobile commerce designers.

Ben Davis gives excellent advice on features needed for great mobile commerce design in general, which I’ll be using here, but skewing it towards features more suited to travel sites. 

For this feature I’ll be taking a look at a range of travel sites all optimised for mobiles: EasyJet, Ryanair, Booking.com, TripAdvisor, Secret Escapes, Voyage Prive, Expedia, Mr & Mrs Smith, Laterooms and Skyscanner.

Tripadvisor is most visible travel site in organic search: report

Booking a holiday involves a huge amount of research finding the right destination, picking accommodation and flights, reading reviews, and finally making a booking.

Therefore search marketing in the travel industry is both incredibly competitive and complex.

A new report from Epiphany looks at which travel sites are the most visible websites across Google’s paid and organic search results, where visibility is defined by ‘paid visibility’ and ‘SEO visibility’ scores.

It shows that Tripadvisor is the most visible brand, with travel aggregator sites featuring prominently in the list.

Qype weeds out thousands of fake reviews

Qype has announced that it cut more than 2,000 fake reviews last month as it seeks to clean up its listings.

It said that around 3% of new reviews have been deleted since it declared war on unethical listings last year.

ASA forces TripAdvisor to stop claiming its reviews are ‘trusted’

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has ordered TripAdvisor to rewrite some of its marketing messages in response to a complaint from online reputation company KwikChex and two hotels that claim to represent hundred of others.

The complaint was first made last September, and the site at that time removed the slogan “reviews you can trust” from its hotel listings and replaced it with “reviews from our community”. Now, all of the changes enforced by the ASA have been made.

Five reasons Wall Street is cold to tech IPOs

We may be in a bubble, but you wouldn’t necessarily know it considering the latest generation of internet IPOs.

Groupon’s stock is trading below its first day closing price, Zynga’s stock closed below its issue price when it debuted last week and the market didn’t seem too excited about the spin-off of TripAdvisor from Expedia.

So what gives? If everyone knows that the internet is the real deal, why aren’t these new issues selling like hotcakes? Here are five reasons.