Personalization continues to be pursued relentlessly in travel, from legitimate attempts to tailor products to more murky user-based pricing manipulations.
TripAdvisor is stepping into the personalized fray with a product called "Just For You," which delivers user-targeted hotel recommendations based on user inputs and historical behavior. The official line is "based on their individual preferences and travel research on the site."
The feature also includes the ability to add tags, which gives the user control over how the personalization is tailored to a specific search. Upon inputting a search, users will be prompted to select from a variety of tags - travel style, location, price range, hotel class, amenities and brand.
This user participation is important, as it reduces the creep factor and makes the implied data usage more palatable as it can be customized per search. From the release:
Through the new Just for You feature, TripAdvisor will take this feedback into account along with the traveler’s prior research and contributions on the site to deliver better, more personalized results to help the travelers find a better hotel for their needs and interests.
The results appear in the familiar TripAdvisor list interface, with the personalized recommendations ranked in descending order for that specific search and user. Note the "match" icon, followed by the tags that fit that particular hotel.
The product will be constantly tweaked according to various user behaviors, such as searching for hotels on the site and writing hotel reviews, in addition to the preference tags selected for each search.
Adam Medros, the SVP of Global Product of TripAdvisor, sees this as a natural evolution of the company's growing trove of user data:
By virtue of the insights and attributes that we’ve gathered from millions of traveler reviews and opinions, TripAdvisor is uniquely able to match travelers with their ideal hotels. The new Just for You feature is the evolution of hotel search on TripAdvisor and a natural extension of our ongoing efforts to make every travel-planning experience more helpful and personally relevant for our users.
Of course, this sort of personalization is ripe for opaque manipulations that segment certain high-spending users into higher hotel prices. Users could be placed in different funnels according to certain details - previous browsing behavior, device, platform and other inferred characteristics like income, education and price sensitivity.
Yet, for those users who regularly purchase hotels, this sort of price segmentation makes complete sense. Users that generally purchase upscale hotels want to see more upscale hotels - so as long as TripAdvisor maintains integrity by listening to both implied and offered information from the user, the product seems like a useful tool to sift through the enormous amount of data available when researching hotels.
NB: Just for you finger image courtesy Shutterstock.