Show HN: TripExpert – Professional Hotel Reviews • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: TripExpert – Professional Hotel Reviews

#41

Post by avalaunch » Sat, Jun 14, 2014, 5:02 AM UTC

ckoglmeier wrote: post #27

Interesting to note that this is where TripAdvisor initially started. It turned out its really hard to scale this 1) globally and 2) efficiently and thats where UGC came into play. Question on the trust factor: Why should a user trust "professional" reviews over the collective opinion of the crowds? Professionals can never experience everything, so will be working from a smaller knowledge base to start and are probab…

I think they give a pretty good answer to this question in their 'about' section: http://www.tripexpert.com/about

1) up to 40% of user hotel reviews are fake, 2) users rarely visit more than 1 hotel per city so have no basis for comparison, whereas experts (presumably) visit multiple hotels in each city, 3) users tend to post reviews after having a 'marginal experience' that isn't really all that applicable to other users.

I think they should consider putting these 3 points on the main page as it was the first question I had when I visited.

Re: Show HN: TripExpert – Professional Hotel Reviews

#42

Post by phil21 » Sat, Jun 14, 2014, 6:08 AM UTC

Cool site.

One nitpick: It looks like the automated scraper is bad at "de-duplicating" syndicated (or stolen?) content.

Example: http://www.tripexpert.com/saint-paul/hotels/le-meridien-cham...

Note the identical review text. That would immediately turn me off to the site as "obvious marketing spam" if it wasn't first posted here.

Pretty neat though, I can see how this would be useful in companion with some of the user generated review sites.

Re: Show HN: TripExpert – Professional Hotel Reviews

#43

Post by aknicol » Sat, Jun 14, 2014, 12:35 PM UTC

avalaunch wrote: post #40

aknicol wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the feedback! Very glad to hear that you like the site so much. I agree with a lot of your suggestions, and some of them (like the filters automatically updating) we're going to be implementing soon. To answer your questions, it took about 9 months to build the site (RoR), although the majority of that time was spent developing a back-end that we use to manage all of the hotel and review data.

Awesome. So what do the stars represent? Is that a different sort of rating for each hotel?

It is actually just the "standard" 5-star hotel rating scale. (I put standard in quotation marks because there isn't actually a worldwide common standard for what constitutes e.g. a 4-star hotel.) We've been wondering about whether it is confusing for people to display this alongside our own TripExpert Score. Sounds like you think it is?

Re: Show HN: TripExpert – Professional Hotel Reviews

#44

Post by avalaunch » Mon, Jun 16, 2014, 1:10 AM UTC

aknicol wrote: post #43

avalaunch wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Awesome. So what do the stars represent? Is that a different sort of rating for each hotel?

It is actually just the "standard" 5-star hotel rating scale. (I put standard in quotation marks because there isn't actually a worldwide common standard for what constitutes e.g. a 4-star hotel.) We've been wondering about whether it is confusing for people to display this alongside our own TripExpert Score. Sounds like you think it is?

Yeah I really had no idea what it was. I think the TripExpert number score is enough. That's the number that matters. At least that's what you're telling me, so why muddle that with another number.

The main reason to include the 5 star rating would be if your score was relative to that. For example, an 80 at a 5 star hotel was much better than an 80 at a 3 star hotel. But I don't think that's the case, is it?

Re: Show HN: TripExpert – Professional Hotel Reviews

#45

Post by aknicol » Mon, Jun 16, 2014, 5:26 PM UTC

avalaunch wrote: post #44

aknicol wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is actually just the "standard" 5-star hotel rating scale. (I put standard in quotation marks because there isn't actually a worldwide common standard for what constitutes e.g. a 4-star hotel.) We've been wondering about whether it is confusing for people to display this alongside our own TripExpert Score. Sounds like you think it is?

Yeah I really had no idea what it was. I think the TripExpert number score is enough. That's the number that matters. At least that's what you're telling me, so why muddle that with another number. The main reason to include the 5 star rating would be if your score was relative to that. For example, an 80 at a 5 star hotel was much better than an 80 at a 3 star hotel. But I don't think that's the case, is it?

I agree. We're probably going to delete it. Thanks for the feedback!