While I don’t really need a Travel Advisor (I don’t go anywhere anymore), TripAdvisor will always be one of my favorite web sites. Especially today. Today, it’s my favorite.
But before I espouse on why, I’d like to go off on a tangent. What the hell is wrong with travel sites? Why is it that so many other sites that came after them could think of a good name that happened to have a domain name available? I mean, c’mon!
First we have Travelocity. Travel to the city? Traverse lots of cities? Travel velocity makes no sense. It makes me think I’m on a dying satellite about to burn up in the atmosphere in a horrible fiery crash. No one wants to think about that when they’re about to travel. It also makes me think of terminal velocity, another bad thought when traveling.
Next there’s Orbitz. Again, space travel is nice and and all but if I’m not a trekkie, I’m not interested.
Priceline – That sounds like a consumer protection show hosted by a Ralph Nader wannabe on my local cable access provider.
Expedia– Okay, I know we all have our issues with Microsoft, but if this isn’t the cluster of all clusters, I’m not sure what is. While I have absolutely no proof of this, I strongly believe that they chose the names for Encarta and Expedia at the same time and got them mixed up in some guy’s inbox. Look it up on your local conspiracy web site.
Anyhoo, here’s TravelAdvisor.
While the over abundance of information can be intimidating, the “I wanna be something to everyone” personality can be overwhelming and the intense saturation of ad and travel placement is incredibly annoying, it’s got a lot of good travel stuff on it. It’s the Epinions of travel – before Epinions jumped the shark.
There are few people I trust more than the average Internet user. Come to think of it, that’s probably not a bright move on my part. Nonetheless, the collective of Joe Internet has rarely steered me wrong. That’s what TripAdvisor provides in abundance. It was 2.0 before people labeled 2.0. Now, if there’s only one jerk and he says, YOU GOTTA STAY AT THIS WEB SITE! THEY HAVE….yada, yada, yada, by now, you know not to listen. They also let you post photos, which I’ve found to be very useful.
When a normal person, without a giant wide angle fisheye lens, who forgot to send a professional cleaning crew into his room, shows you what a room looks like, you really know what to expect. No trickery.
TripAdvisor also has a unique and useful, albeit incredibly clunky way of showing the best price for hotels and vacations across all those other web sites I mentioned, along with some random less popular vacation sites that occasionally have good deals.
It opens up a new window for each vacation site, compare the cost of a single hotel across all those sites. Kinda reminds me of all those illegal “warez” software sites… or so I’ve heard. Still, if you can control it, you won’t end up in pop-up hell.
TripAdvisor is a bit like the incredible Hulk. it can be damn useful, but if you let it get out of control, you’re going to make one hell of a miss.