Just shy of her one-year anniversary as TripAdvisor’s president of core experience, Lindsay Nelson took the stage at WiT Singapore on Tuesday to discuss her work leading the company’s brand and development of content and revenue-generating products.
In an interview with WiT founder Yeoh Siew Hoon, Lindsay shared details of how the 20-year-old company is repositioning itself for the future, with a focus on relevance more than volume, redesigning the mobile experience and creating new monetization streams.
Here are highlights of Nelson’s comments in that interview.
On what TripAdvisor has learned from talking to its customers…
Nelson: For many years we celebrated our scale because we thought it represented the ultimate objectivity. We celebrated the volume of reviews, and we celebrated the ranking.
What we now understand is people don’t actually care about 10,000 reviews, they care about the five reviews of the people they think they have something in common with.
The scale is absolutely essential, because without the scale you are not going to find people to connect with. but it’s our responsibility to create an experience that’s easy and fast and personalisoned and we should do much of the heavy lifting for you [to find relevant reviews].
On what she has learned about the travel industry…
Nelson: We kind of operate in a sea of sameness. The category all starts to blend into each other, the commercials look the same, everybody is selling the aspiration of travel and deals and there’s tech that all starts to look the same.
In order for us to actually drive transformation, we can’t continue to fight that other person’s fight. We need to reassert and be in a category of one and what that means is we need to be as close to the traveller’s need as possible. We can’t act and behave like an OTA and expect to remain the world’s largest travel guidance platform.
You can’t tinker your way into change. You have to have the confidence to take bold steps and bold swings and sound a little bit differently. Ultimately my job is to come in and be a transformation agent. That means to transform how we deliver consumer experiences, transform the brand and transform how we think about monetising.
On the need to put the brand first…
Nelson: Brand marketing is strangely absent in the travel category. We’ve been really focused on conversion and performance, and we forget that if you don’t have an emotional relationship with someone, they don’t have any loyalty.
So we’ve done a lot of work around brand strategy that has really led us to that truth, which is the best guides are people like you who have been there before. The best guides are not algorithms, they are not rankings, they are not deals. The best guides are people who’ve had real experiences that you can benefit from.
On TripAdvisor’s role in in-destination experiences…
Nelson: We have ambitions to continue to be the world’s largest travel guidance company and helping you find things whether three weeks out, three months out or three hours out. That means we have a lot of work to do on mobile in terms of making it much easier for us to recognise when you’re on Trip.
On revenue strategy…
Nelson: The meta option continues to be a large driver of our revenue. I come from a media world where you look at the number of engaged users we have and the engagement frequency that we have. And if you look at our [TripAdvisor’s] monetization, it’s not challenging to imagine that we have additional upsides in continuing to figure out how we monetize engagement outside of the folks who are ready and willing to book their trip.
On how TripAdvisor can compete with reviews in Google Maps…
Nelson: I believe profoundly that Google is always going to be the best, unfortunately… at organising the world’s information, but at the end of the day I think if you are making travel plans, you want advice and recommendations from people, not from search results.
