If you liked or disliked TripAdvisor's hotel reviews, you now have traveler-taken photos to consider.
TripAdvisor has given users the opportunity to post hotel photos for years, but since June, TripAdvisor's global sites have featured traveler photos right beneath hotel-submitted professional photos on hotel details pages.
TripAdvisor currently displays some 8 million photos from travelers.
Consider this display of the The Circus Hotel in Berlin on TripAdvisor's Germany site:
Note that four of 225 userfotos anzeigen (user photos) are displayed on the hotel details page.
Actually, The Circus Hotel is an exception to the rule because it is one of the few properties with no displays of professional photos above the traveler photos.
In general, professional photos submitted by the hotel are displayed above the traveler photos and when you select the link to professonal photos, you navigate to property images on other Expedia Inc. websites such as Expedia.com, Hotels.com or Agoda.com, for instance.
When TripAdvisor users write reviews, they have the option to upload their own photos of the property as long as they are "family friendly" and "original, non-copyrighted images" and users certifiy "I am the owner of these photos, and my posting them on TripAdvisor does not infringe upon the rights of any third party. I accept TripAdvisor's Terms of Use. "
As you navigate through the traveler photos, you can sometimes get a more realistic appraisal of the hotel than you might if you just were relying on the hotel-submitted images. You can also vote thumbs up or down to the photos and link to the photographers' TripAdvisor profiles.
The traveler photos can be filtered by categories such as room/suite, view from the room, bathroom or those "provided by management."
Each traveler photo also has a link to "see professional photos."
So, when viewing photos of the Hilton Paris La Defense on TripAdvisor.com, you can peruse a traveler photo of the desk layout:
Or you can take a look at what purports to be a traveler photo of a bathroom ceiling at the Hilton Paris La Defense:
However, in this instance, it's doubtful many people will be using the hotel search widget to the bottom right of the ceiling photo.
Kevin Carter, a TripAdvisor spokesman, says the company decided to give traveler photos more prominance to improve the travel-planning process.
"This enables owners to showcase their properties and allows TripAdvisor users to see millions of traveler photos to help them better plan their trips," Carter says.
It's a natural extension of TripAdvisor's user-generated content.