Founders at Work.pdf

Stephen Kaufer 371
we’re going to sue your butts for $2 million.” We sent it over to our legal department
so they were aware of it, but our response was a polite, “We verified that
the review meets our guidelines.” End of story.
In 5 years, we haven’t been sued by anyone—because, when you actually go
look up the law, we’re protected. There may be some hotel owners with a legitimate
beef, but there are some hotel owners that are really just not very bright.
They’ll complain about how terrible this review is and their email is from
abc@yahoo.com, and then the next day a review will appear on their property,
written by an email address of abc@yahoo.com, saying, “I stayed at this place,
and it was absolutely magnificent. The views were spectacular.” I’m thinking,
“You’re just writing a review, posing as a guest, on your own property—24 hours
ago you used the same email address to tell us that you were the owner complaining
about a past review. Do you really think we’re that dumb?”
Initially it really didn’t matter. Our traffic is so high now that we know, for
better or for worse, we have a significant impact on where visitors are choosing
to stay. For every city, we kind of have a satisfaction index; we rate which hotels
our travelers like the most. If you’re ranked first or you’re ranked 20th, the
number of reservation calls or bookings you’re going to get is going to change.
When we changed our algorithm, it dropped some hotels and raised others.
Our phones were ringing, because we had had a material effect on their
businesses.
When Google changes their algorithm today or when they update things, it
has a significant effect on the people who run their business based upon getting
traffic from the Google search engine. For us it’s a responsibility, because we
want people to trust TripAdvisor. People absolutely post scathing reviews. But
we don’t want to be spammed. We don’t want hotel owners to tell all of their
employees to go write wonderful reviews of the property. So we have our techniques
and our human and algorithmic ways to detect that sort of fraud, to keep
the accuracy of TripAdvisor as high as we can.
Livingston: I like that your site has an impact on keeping the hotel owners
honest.
Kaufer: It’s not just for traveling, but for a lot of things that people are collecting
user reviews on now. You may go to Cincinnati for a business or leisure trip.
If you have a bad experience with a Super 8 motel, before a site like TripAdvisor,
basically there was nothing you could do about it. You could file a complaint at
the Better Business Bureau, but how many times have you, when making a
reservation at a place you’ve never stayed at, called up the local Better Business
Bureau to find out how many complaints were lodged? None. So here you go to
TripAdvisor and you look up the place, and you see that seven out of the last
eight reviews all gave it a 1 out of 5 rating and talked about smelly carpets and
rude staff. You’re just not going to stay there unless it’s the only place in town.
That’s the impact that five or six people had. Total strangers. But the hotel
owner that wants to run this crappy place, preying off of the brand that they’re
under, and maybe their location as being near to something, that person has to
kind of shape up, maybe take something out of their profits and put it back into