

Show HN: TripExpert – Professional Hotel Reviews - iamdann
http://tripexpert.com/

======
avalaunch
Really well done, beautiful and useful site. Out of curiosity, how long did
this take you to build? What stack are you using?

A couple of things I noticed:

1\. After updating a search, the back button doesn't work the way I would
expect it to. If I choose to look at a property and then back out it takes me
to the pre-updated search whereas I would expect it to take me back to my
search with filters in tact. If I don't look at a property and press the back
button it takes me out of search altogether where I would expect it to take me
to the pre-filtered search.

2\. On the search results page, the stars confuse me. I don't know what they
represent.

3\. It would be nice to be able to see hotels that score below 60 (perhaps as
a filter option). Budget conscious shoppers might find they are lacking
options otherwise in certain cities. Sometimes you're just looking for the
best of the cheapest, even if it's not a 60+ hotel.

4\. From the blog page, I think the TripExpert logo should take you to the
main TripExpert home page, not the TripExpert blog home page. I see the Visit
TripExpert link but considering that is (probably) the primary action you're
probably hoping for, I think it shouldn't be hidden in the nav like that.

5\. I was also initially confused when I added a filter and the search results
didn't automatically update. I think that's become such a standard UX that you
might want to adopt it too.

Overall though, this is really impressive. Great job. I think you have a
wonderfully bright future ahead of you.

EDIT: Added 4th suggestion

EDIT 2: Added 5th suggestion

~~~
aknicol
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.

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

~~~
aknicol
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?

~~~
avalaunch
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?

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

------
karanbhangui
Very cool. As someone who travels a lot, this is a welcomed resource. I find
it very hard to get trustworthy reviews of hotels from Yelp. Generally people
have posting bias (negative experience) and often it's specific to a certain
suite type or pre-construction of a certain wing of the hotel. Professional in
depth reviews will go a long way to help fix this.

Valuable things in a review would also be a listing of some travel essentials
like availability of cost and speed of internet, microwave, fridge, room
service hours, free shuttle availability, quality of concierge during night
shifts, etc.

------
atmosx
Out of curiosity how do these websites work? (e.g. like booking.com) They
build an API and the HOTEL connects it's system this API and then info about
rooms/scheduling/prices/pictures are available?

The financial goes by % I guess. You get a % for every booking through your
website. But what happens on the technical side?!

~~~
tbrick855
TripExpert is using expedia's affiliate program. You can signup as an
affiliate in a few minutes. They give you a link that takes your users to
expedia's site to complete the booking. You get a small percentage of the
bookings made via your link.

Hotel.com which is owned by expedia connects to hotels via a Global
Distribution System (GDS) like Sabre or Pegasus. All reasonable sized hotel's
connect to one of the GDS's (there are 3-4) and travel agents and OTA's like
expedia and priceline also connect to them. Getting access to one of the GDS
systems takes time and costs a lot. The GDS's speak XML using the Open Travel
Alliance's spec. Travel agents typically make a 10% commission on books they
make. Hotels pay the commission to the TA and usually a couple of dollars per
booking to the GDS. Expedia and the other big OTA's do it differently, making
deals with each hotel company and charge much higher commissions.

------
saryant
I like this.

The biggest problem with TripAdvisor hotel reviews (besides fake reviews) is
that varied background of the individual reviewer.

Witness how a Holiday Inn can wind up rated higher than a Park Hyatt, simply
because of the background of the majority of TA reviewers.

I've largely given up on TA for reviews. For chain hotels, I find FlyerTalk's
convention of a dedicated thread per hotel or locality _far_ more valuable,
especially because those reviews are specifically from the perspective of
frequent travelers rather than once-a-year flyers heading to Disneyland.

For example, 2100+ posts on every possible minute detail of the Conrad Hong
Kong: [http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/hilton-hilton-
hhonors/124932-...](http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/hilton-hilton-
hhonors/124932-conrad-hong-kong.html)

~~~
aknicol
Yeah, I agree; in my experience, high-end hotels often get unfairly rated on
TA, in large part because they often get a lot of negative reviews from people
who thought that they were too expensive or offered poor value for money. They
often end up ranking far too low.

FlyerTalk is a great resource, although you do have to spend a lot of time
reading a lot of reviews. The advantage of an aggregator like TripExpert, with
snippets from various sources all on one page, is that you can get a much
better sense much more quickly of what a place is like.

------
tnuc
It's like Rotten Tomatoes for Hotels.

The main problem with a site like this is that the reviews in most of the
guidebooks write something based on TripAdvisor or the like.

Most guidebooks these days are written by compilers who gather information
from the internet.

------
christudor
This looks great: it's a well-designed site and solves a lot of the problems
in TA. The idea that people will rate hotels higher based on "marginal
experiences" is very well put, and probably true. Will definitely use in the
future.

------
netfire
Nice site. A few thoughts:

\- The city search doesn't work if you specify the state (San Antonio, TX for
example). I didn't wait for the autocomplete to load and just pressed enter
and it returned no results.

\- It would be nice if the results automatically updated when changing
filters, instead of having to click an "Update Results" button. Also, usually
filters are above or to the left of results, not on the right.

\- I expected clicking on the small map on the list view to take me to the map
view, instead of having to click on the link below. The map is too small in
the list view to really be usable as an interactive map.

------
phil21
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...](http://www.tripexpert.com/saint-paul/hotels/le-meridien-chambers-
minneapolis)

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.

------
zippergz
This is pretty cool. It seems like the search doesn't work that well for me,
though. I first typed in "San Diego, CA" and got "no results matched." Only
then did I realize that if I type "San Diego" and wait a few seconds (it took
about 5 seconds), the autocomplete would populate. But it seems like the
matching should be a little bit looser. I tried to find results for Maui,
Hawaii, but couldn't figure out how (I entered "Maui" and waited and nothing
popped up in the autocomplete, and then searched simply on that term and got
no results).

~~~
iamdann
Thanks for the feedback. We're definitely still working on perfecting the
search, so this is helpful.

------
jeletonskelly
This is a great site and idea; much needed. Do you have an API? I work at a
"sort of" OTA "start-up" (200+ mm visitors a year) and it would be nice to
explore including these reviews on our site.

~~~
iamdann
Yup, we've got an API. Shoot me an email at dann@tripexpert.com!

------
bjohnso5
Interesting... my corporate firewall flags your site with an adult-and-
pornography filter. Did you recently purchase the domain from someone who may
have been running a different type of site? :)

~~~
iamdann
Yeah, that's so weird! We've heard that from a few people. We're currently
looking into it. Neither of us can find any history of the domain being used
for anything adult or porn related. So strange.

~~~
cschmidt
It looks like the domain had three eras. It was parked for a while, then it
was taken over by domainauctionhouse.com, and now you guys.

[http://web.archive.org/web/20040601000000*/http://tripexpert...](http://web.archive.org/web/20040601000000*/http://tripexpert.com)

The domainauctionhouse page had a link to domains for sale, which had an Adult
section. Maybe the links to domains with bad words in them caused it to end up
on filters.

[http://web.archive.org/web/20050205024618/http://www.domaina...](http://web.archive.org/web/20050205024618/http://www.domainauctionhouse.com/)

------
ckoglmeier
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
probably more corruptible than 150 MM people or wherever TripAdvisor is these
days.

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

------
Holbein
Great site!

So how do you come up with the TripExpert score? Do you read every review, map
it manually to a number, then get the average? Or is it more like Rotten
Tomatoes where each review only gets a shot at a thumps up or thumps down, and
then you average those?

Btw: Slight coding error: On city pages, hotel names are overlaid over the
preview icon, which makes them very hard to read on Safari 5.1.

~~~
iamdann
Thanks for the bug report.

We have an algorithm that looks at a large number of factors (number of
reviews, each reviewer's unique denotation system, number of hotels in a
destination, sentiment, etc) and calculates the number.

------
MattGrommes
This is a great looking site but for me it illustrates the problem with
"expert" sites versus "crowd" sites. Yeah, you have a ton of hotels in NYC,
LA, etc. but I'm going on vacation to Connecticut and Maine this summer and
there's nothing for either state in your search. I'd love to use it but
there's going to need to be a lot more experts.

~~~
iamdann
We'll be growing, don't worry. Today is day two. :)

------
jussy
Outstanding execution could be smoother in terms of getting to the booking.

have you considered an I'm feeling lucky function?

Do you have an API that other developers or designers can extend?

Have you considered other verticals such as cruises and tours?

Hope it goes well guys love to hear from you what the conversion rate from
users.

hutch

~~~
aknicol
Thanks for the positive feedback! Yes, we're building an API that will let
other travel sites pull our scores, rankings and review extracts. If you or
anyone you know might want to make use of it, tell them to get in touch! And,
yes, we're considering other verticals.

------
ape4
I can't see a way to search for a hotel by name once a city has been selected.
This is the first thing I tried to do.

The rank is supposed to be how well it does in its class. But I looked a few
cities and the best hotel was always expensive (over $300). Never a good for
the value midrange hotel. So it seems best isn't best in class.

------
sixQuarks
Beautifully designed and very useful. I hope this is a big success! What's
your background, how did you start this site?

~~~
iamdann
My co-founder and I actually met at a hackathon a few years ago and worked on
an early version of the site. It's very exciting to finally launch!

My co-founder Andrew is a lawyer-turned-developer. I'm a former tech
journalist (Laptop Mag, The Verge).

~~~
sixQuarks
Who did the design? Also, a little usability tip: When a user clicks on
"Price" to sort, I think most users expect to see the lowest price first. You
have it sorted by highest price first. I would reverse that.

Also, I noticed the lowest price hotels often don't have a great score (around
60-70). Do you only list hotels that hit a certain score threshold (meaning,
as a user, can I trust that no matter what hotel shows up in your listings, it
means I can expect a good stay?) - or do I still need to be wary of the scores
and avoid ones with low points?

~~~
iamdann
Our designer was someone that my co-founder had worked with before. And thanks
for the tip about price sorting.

We don't list any hotels with a score lower than 60, which means every hotel
is a quality hotel.

~~~
mietek
Do you mind sharing a link to your designer?

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dmachop
Looks good.

    
    
       "Not every place in the world is on TripExpert... yet. We currently feature over 500 destinations, from major cities to Caribbean beach towns, and we’re adding more all the time." 
    

Isn't 500 too less?

~~~
iamdann
What do you mean?

------
jasonlbaptiste
this is very nice. im literally in the middle of booking a few weeks in greece
with my girlfriend. trying to figure out the hotels on the different islands
is a pain in the ass. will give you more feedback after using it a bit more.

------
aluhut
It looks good. My suggestion for the "Explore"-Page would be a map or at least
a way to sort alphabeticly. I guess the list is now sorted by the ammount of
recommended hotels.

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phibs
Have you considered a 'hint' feature where people can kind of recommend hotels
that are not yet in your database and could be considered personal tips?

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hoopism
"Finally, hotel reviews you can trust."

I thought the beauty of TripADvisor and the like is that it does away with the
old travel guides. Guides are written by people with even more questionable
motive and are quickly outdated. Not sure how many times I have been saved
from bad experience by reading a recent reviews saying "BEWARE Hotel is under
construction for next month..." or something current like that.

Maybe there value in both... not for me.

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rememberlenny
I like the irony of AirBnB styling for the hotel industry.

