Whether you are interested in booking Hotel, looking for a place to go out to dinner or just checking out a nice place to go for your next vacation, Tripadvisor.com is the place to go.
Over ten years ago the only way to do any of these tasks would be going to a travel agent, that wasn’t available for you 24/7 and even so you wouldn’t really get all the possibilities or the best prices of the market. To look for a place to go Scuba Diving in the Caribbean you’d want to start by asking friends or family if they knew of someone that had gone there or if they by chance had gone there. You will probably end up going to your travel agent who was going to tell you the only rates she had and since you didn’t have something to compare it with and of course if your travel agent isn’t family or a really good friend, that’s going to cost you to.
Mainly Tripadvisor started out of the lack of an interactive travel site that could compare prices and ratings, that was available 24/7 and for free.
To stand out from other travel sites they designed a web community where everyone could rate the places on behalf of their experiences, and furthermore it is not just a travel site, it is more of a community where any company can advertise their own activity, restaurant, hotel or even services so people can rate them. Having the possibility to choose from various companies you can always look for the best rate at the best place.
When Tripadvisor started out, they probably used the SWOT framework to analyze their potential Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. From my point of view, when they started out their Strength was the possibility to get feedback from hundreds of thousands of users that would post reviews on the things they’ve done and the fact that you could be able to compare prices, be a travel agent 24/7 and for no cost to the user. Their Opportunities was the fact that no competitor on the market had this approach. A
References: Fernades, Jonash, Pattel and Wyatt (without year). Online Customer Network. Connectivate, 112-113. Verril (2013). History of CRM Software. Retrieved from: http://blog.softwareadvice.com/articles/crm/history-of-crm-software-011/