Last week TripAdvisor announced the launch of its Business Travel Centre which focuses on providing rankings and reviews specifically for business travellers – including a Business Popularity Index for ranking the hotels. This move illustrates the importance of pyscho-graphics in user-generated content. Many users will often comment that they do not use reviews and rankings websites because they can’t trust the reviews – others swear by them. One of the biggest complaint being that you can not tell if the person writing the review is of the same mindset as the reader.

Adding demographic information about the reviewer goes along way to making the reviews and ratings valuable. Sites that offer reviews and ratings should have information about the approximate age, nationally and sex of the person doing the review. Other valuable information could include whether the traveller was travelling in a group or alone and as TripAdvisor has shown the purpose of the trip.

Qualifying reviews in this way puts a review into perspective for the reader. For example, a group of English lads travelling on their gap year are far more likely to want a hostel that has good nightlife and social space as opposed to an American girl travelling alone, who is going to be far more interested in a hostel that is quieter for a good nights sleep, has good cooking facilities and security. Reading the above reviews in isolation could be very misleading, the girl may rate the hostel very highly based on her criteria – so the boys, not knowing the reviewer – will choose to stay here as well, and inevitably be disappointed.

On the Backpacking Queensland website we developed a number of years ago we added the functionality to upload pictures with the reviews also. This is the only website I know of that has done this. The idea being that if the reviewer has a complaint about the property being dirty they can substantiate the information with an image – or better still if the reviewer has great comments they will add a picture of people having a great time.

The TripAdvisor Business Travel Centre has a lot more to offer than just filtering reviews and rankings based on whether the traveller is a business traveller (such as integrated maps for meetings, trip planning and wiki contents), but for me the most important part is the reinforcement of the importance of distinguishing that not all travellers are the same and the more information that can be added about a reviewer the more valuable will be the review.

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