TripAdvisor acquires cruise evaluation site

Wednesday, 29 May, 2007 0

TripAdvisor has acquired The Independent Traveler, Inc., publisher of Cruise Critic.

“Kathleen Tucker and her team have done a phenomenal job building the most popular cruise community in the world,” said Stephen Kaufer, founder and CEO of TripAdvisor. He added:

“This acquisition is a great addition to our portfolio of leading travel communities and content sites and gives us a strong foothold in the $32 billion cruise market.”

“TripAdvisor’s model of acquiring best-of-breed travel media companies and allowing them to continue to operate independently is ideal for us,” said Kathleen Tucker, founder and president of The Independent Traveler, Inc.

The Independent Traveler, based in Pennington, New Jersey, generates the majority of its revenue through online advertising and content licensing. Terms of the acquisition are undisclosed but the company says it operates profitably.

There are no near-term plans for extensive integration of the business or the Web domains and no staffing changes are expected, according to company officials.

Tripadvisor.com has defended the integrity of its hotel reviews following suggestions at a recent conference that fraudulent reviews are still being published.

Senior executive Marc Charron claimed that the site is getting more sophisticated at detecting false reviews – and secondly that its readers are savvy enough to ignore bogus entries.

As the largest website for user hotel reviews, the site receives around 1,400 reviews a day, and in the past has been criticized for allowing reviews to be published that are not posted by genuine guests.

Report by David Wilkening

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