News last week that TUI Travel is launching its own user review and recommendation site across mainland Europe indicates yet again that large travel companies are keen to get their hands on unique content.
TUI's new Cheqqer service is interesting in that it is planning a two-tiered approach to getting content - starting from the bottom up in terms of attracting new reviews to the platform and also aggregating reviews from TUI's myriad of brands.
Nothing wrong with that, except that two years is a long time in the world of user generated content and those with longish memories will recall how TUI's Thomson division bought the well regarded (and well-SEOed!) Holidays Uncovered site in September 2007.
At the time, Holidays Uncovered was seen as Thomson's - and by extension, some said, TUI's - route into UGC.
But in an almost simultaneous move as that of buying HU, Thomson signed a deal with the omnipresent TripAdvisor to run its reviews into the main Thomson website.
To say there was a degree of confusion in some quarters would be an understatement, but an organisation with the collective brain power and expertise of TUI would clearly know what it's doing, so the most were content to wait and see.
Roll on two years and, as Sandra Leonhard, TUI's director of web strategy and business development, says - TUI is starting over again with a new review and UGC brand.
Leonhard says probably quite rightly that the Cheqqer brand image wouldn't be appropriate for, say, Thomson's bucket and spade holidays and therefore throwing Cheqqer as a brand its own right into the UK mainstream market is unlikely.
However, when pressed on what happens to the Thomson site given that it has TripAdvisor reviews and its own review system already, but the TUI mother ship is creating a major new review site in Cheqqer, Leonhard muddies the waters a bit.
Thomson could, it turns out, quite feasibly have reviews streaming in from its TripAdvisor partnership, Cheqqer AND its own reviews. Yes, three review and recommendation systems on one site.
And this still doesn't answer the question ("it's a Thomson issue, not TUI") as to what happens to all those Holidays Uncovered reviews.