TripAdvisor

TripAdvisor is an online travel community providing more than 5 million unbiased reviews and opinions on travel destinations, vacations, travel packages, vacation packages, and travel guides. It also covers thousands of hotels and tourist attractions. TripAdvisor's success lies in the fact that it features real advice from real travelers and provides easy access to major online travel sites, like Expedia, Orbitz, and American Airlines. However, TripAdvisor does not take reservations for hotels or flights. Since TripAdvisor is free to use, it generates revenues through advertising.

TripAdvisor requires its users to create an account in order to access most features of the site.In addition to interacting with other travelers, members also get access to weekly deals, reviews and news on any destination that they might choose. In the TripAdvisor forums, travelers ask and answer thousands of travel-related questions every day. There is also a feature called TripAdvisor Inside, where users can add factual information on destinations by editing the content on their own. A real time guidebook provides information on topics like transportation, activities and dining.

The TripAdvisor site also has a Popularity Index which incorporates reviews, guidebook entries, newspaper articles and other web content. Other travelers can also give ratings to content with the help of The TripAdvisor Traveler Rating. The latter is a proprietary algorithm based on the quality and quantity of submitted reviews.