The company formerly known as Swiftrank comes back with a new name and entirely new concept. The company changed its name to TravelShark in 2011, and followed a $5 million investment back in 2011 with a period of relative quiet. The company now no longer focuses on connecting hotels to travelers - it is on an ambitious mission to redefine reviews.
Moving away from the arbitrary nature of the 5-star system, TravelShark distills a place into its most commonly referenced qualities. Called its "Essence," this is a wordgraph that highlights words most often used to describe a particular place.
The genius here is that words are much more qualitative than stars. They deliver a much more comprehensive and descriptive view of a particular place. The star rating system has its limitations, as it is not an objective measurement of a place.
One person may think a place deserves 3 stars, while yet another may see the very same experience as meriting 4 stars. This sort of subjectivity can be seen in differing star ratings from people in the very same party at a restaurant, for example.
The star rating is also one of the more contentious measures of a place. The lack of specificity is something that many business owners push back against as an unfair, subjective measure of their nuanced establishment.
By removing the star rating, and focusing on what people actually say about the place, the idea is that potential customers can get a better understanding of the atmosphere and vibe of a particular place before choosing it.
For example, someone looking for a romantic, quiet restaurant for a date would be able to determine this much more quickly from the Essence rather than a simple star review - or having to pore through dozens of reviews to distill the relevant information to the particular situation. This will lead to a more efficient use of reviews, allowing readers to more quickly determine if a place is what they're looking for.
Or for someone looking for a more lively atmosphere, here's the Driskill Bar in Austin, Texas' Essence:
Business owners and others who dislike Yelp's iron grip on the review space will most certainly welcome a new player to the market - especially a player that is rethinking the entire review process.
CEO Toma Bedolla, the guiding hand behind the new direction, believes that it's time to re-think reviews, and their place in the travel planning process.
Reviews are increasingly important to travelers, but the process of reading through them is cumbersome, to say the least. That’s why we created a new, unique way to look at reviews. Essences, which look a lot like word clouds, display the most mentioned phrases about what a place is actually like. We’ve been testing this idea with restaurants, and the feedback has been incredible.
The technology exists to learn a tremendous amount of information from every transaction. Essences are key to this process. By understanding everything that we can about what people say about a particular restaurant or hotel for example, we can begin to understand all of the aspects that matter, be they unique or common.
The Essence concept reveals anywhere from 200 to 2000 dimensions about a place that we can then leverage to build a better, deeper preference profile for users that can be used to evaluate matches against future venue options. This means we're creating filters for you specifically, not just for people like you. That's what's been missing from the recommendation process until now.
Users can not only understand a place more quickly, but theoretically should be able to find places that fit their needs more easily.
The treasure trove of qualitative data about individual places and experiences lends itself perfectly to a semantic search ordering of the places of the world. This sort of personalization is a much-sought-after feature in the travel space, and TravelShark aims to dominate.
Toma explains:
True personalization requires learning, not just static filters. In future versions of the product, the more you tell TravelShark what you like, the better our technology is able to understand what kind of places you’ll enjoy discovering next.
We believe that personalization in the travel sector is broken, creating painful travel planning experiences for consumers. Part of the solution requires a shift in the way we look at travel planning.
We are creating a truly robust, personalized experience for consumers that scales by leveraging technologies like Natural Language Processing and semantic analysis.
Monetization will come from partnerships with existing brands, and working with larger travel companies seeking more regular engagement with travelers.
Toma points to some existing partner discussions as proof-of-concept:
In our discussions with OTAs, major hotels and even airlines, there's a desire for major brands to engage users on a more frequent basis. Given the infrequent nature of their transaction relationship (hotels for example may only see a customer once or twice a year) the ability to get personal is inherently limited. What we're doing is providing a service that can be used to provide value to customers on an ongoing basis.
This drives our entry point into restaurants, the single most frequently used feature of smartphones today. It's an easy bridge to cross when you've developed a personal relationship in one vertical to apply it into another, say hotels for example.
A short video on how the new TravelShark works:
TravelShark, essentially a mobile-first product, will soon open up into beta for a limited initial rollout.