How did TripAdvisor get so many hotel reviews?
TripAdvisor started out back in 2000 by searching the web for travel articles and information and categorizing them. The info would come from major newspapers, magazine articles, other websites, etc. They’d then tag each article with what it was relevant to. They built up a database of a couple of hundred thousand articles which they then marketed to other websites as customized travel content (like Lycos). After the dot com bust, a lot of those deals fell apart, and they started focusing on their own TripAdvisor.com site. They had a decent amount of content at that point that was destination based. Eventually they added over 50,000 hotels that Expedia covered, and they sent leads to Expedia based on the destination the person was looking for. In time, they created the ability for users to review individual hotel properties, and the rest was history. I’ve glossed over a lot here. If you want to read the full story, then check out a great book called Founders at Work (http://www.amazon.
