12,000 HOTELS PAID FOR ENHANCED LISTING AT TRIPADVISOR

New service by TripAdvisor offering hotels a paid option to post their contact information is welcomed mostly by Parisian and Italian properties.

Presumably the reason for a vast amount of hotels, especially in Europe, having to cut down on their marketing budgets was the crisis of last year, which needs no introduction to the travel industry whatsoever. This meant that many hotels had to refuse the offers of popular consumer sites such as TripAdvisor.com.

Several months ago TripAdvisor.com launched a new service for hotels offering enhanced business listings with their contact information for a fee. The service starts at $600 a year for properties with less than 10 rooms. However so far only 12,000 of accommodation businesses have listed with TripAdvisor despite as much as 50% discounts to hoteliers that decided for early subscription.

Among the 12,000 hotels that are currently featured in the TripAdvisor Business Listing scheme many come from the French capital, Paris. 13 per cent of all Parisian hotels posted on the website opted for the enhanced service (234 properties out of 1,834). Other cities whose hoteliers quickly utilized the chance of getting better visibility at TripAdvisor are the Italian cities of Rome (191), Florence (115) and Venice (101). In total 1,199 hotels across Italy paid for the enhanced listing. Other hotels from around the world have also decided for the new option in large numbers: 108 hoteliers in Marrakech, 98 in Costa Rica and 51 on Santorini.

TripAdvisor is a user review website containing the comments and recommendations of people who have stayed in the given hotels, inns and B+B places. It has been shown that travelers tend to put a huge amount of trust not only into the site, yet into the comments of others so the way the hotel is presented is very important.