Founders at Work.pdf

C H A P T E R
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Stephen Kaufer
Cofounder,TripAdvisor
Steve Kaufer, Langley Steinert, Nick Shanny, and
Thomas Palka started TripAdvisor, an online travel
site, in 2000. Frustrated by the lack of unbiased, useful
information for travelers, they created a site that,
in addition to searching relevant content already on
the Web, let users contribute personal reviews of destinations,
hotels, and attractions. The online travel
forum was a pioneer in the now common practice of
having users pick the winners, instead of leaving the
choices up to human editors.
TripAdvisor became the largest online travel community
in the world, and was acquired in 2004 by Barry Diller’s InterActiveCorp
(IAC). As of July 2006, TripAdvisor had amassed more than five million user
reviews and opinions, covering 220,000-plus hotels and attractions.
Livingston: How did TripAdvisor begin?
Kaufer: The idea came when my wife, Caroline, and I were trying to find a
vacation for ourselves. We started with a travel agent, who recommended an
island and some resort. This was ’98 or ’99, and I thought I’d use the Internet to
find out more. I found a whole lot of websites that would help me book a reservation
at this hotel, but nothing that would tell me whether the hotel was any
good or not for what I was looking for.
Eventually I found some chat rooms that told me that the island was not
particularly safe, and we really didn’t want to go there. That was kind of an eyeopener.
We said, “Good power of the Internet there. Let’s switch travel agents.”
We went to a different one, who recommended a different island, different
place. That time, when I did the research on the Web, after a lot of effort I
found out that the hotel was really not up to my wife’s standards. The picture of
the hotel in the brochure was fabulous, of course, but the commentary from
somebody’s home page that I had found wasn’t too good.
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