Trip Advisor, Origin Story

Business English, Listening and Discussion, Trip Advisor
Business English, Listening and Discussion, Trip Advisor Lingua Habit

We discussed life and travel pre-Trip Advisor, how user-generated content attracts more "eyeballs" to sites, the founding of and original business model of the travel site and the origin story.

"Tripadvisor was founded by Stephen Kaufer, Langley Steinert, Nick Shanny, and Thomas Palka in February 2000. Kaufer has stated the original idea was not a user generated social media review site: We started as a site where we were focused more on those official words from guidebooks or newspapers or magazines."

"Steve Kaufer got the idea for Tripadvisor in 1998 after spending way too many hours online, trying to figure out if a resort in Mexico was really as good as its brochure. When he launched a travel guidance site a few years later, his business plan failed spectacularly because he was trying to partner with other websites, rather than engaging directly with travelers. But Steve eventually arrived at a winning formula: make Tripadvisor available to everyone, aggregate tons of information about hotels and attractions, encourage travelers to add their reviews, and earn a fee from travel companies whenever users clicked to their sites. As the company grew, Steve remained at the helm, leading it through a $210 million sale to IAC, followed by a multi-billion dollar IPO in 2011. Today, Tripadvisor gets over 400 million visitors a month; and Steve—who just stepped down after 22 years—is already thinking about his next business."

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