Coming from a non-travel background, Lindsay Nelson is keen to bring in fresh thinking and ideas to her role as president, Core Experience, TripAdvisor, a responsibility she describes as “bringing consumer empathy to TripAdvisor”.
Lindsay Nelson is “bringing consumer empathy to TripAdvisor”.
“We are a content company, an information platform. It is easy to get confused about what is your consumer value proposition and business model – there is sometimes a tension between the two.
“If you have content, drive loyal and direct traffic and brand preference, you have a strong foundation for an advertising business, then your business model and value proposition are actually complementary.
“The key question we are asking now is, what is the traveller relationship with TripAdvisor?”
To answer that, it is currently in deep research to find out what “customers love about us, what they need from us and what only we can provide them”, said Nelson, who was visiting Singapore as part of a trip to Asia.
“We are doing a meaningful assessment of the brand and tapping into consumer empathy,” said the marketing executive who was recognised by Forbes on its 2018 CMO Next List.
These findings will form the foundation of her mission to build brand preference and brand love for the company she joined last October from Vox Media where she served for about four years.
Going back to its roots to find the secret sauce
“In a way, we are going back to the beginning – the original story, 20 years ago, when Steve Kaufer had the insight to create a place where people, spending their hard earned dollars on vacations, can get a sense of what they are going to get. It was very empathetic to the needs of travellers.”
By conducting this piece of research, TripAdvisor is recognising the need to understand what it now means to travellers. When it started, it had a very clear value proposition – it was the place to go for hotel reviews.
But over time, that proposition has become blurred – is it a meta search, is it an OTA, is it a trip planner or is it a social feed, given its much-publicised revamp last November when Kaufer announced the next big thing to build the world’s most personalized and connected travel community” with one feature, being a personalized travel feed. That move had some people calling it “the Facebook of travel”, and asking, do we need another social platform?
Nelson said response to the new features on the site has been good. “The new product has a curated, digest feel and the feed is dynamic and incredibly useful, it allows you to pick up where you left off. We have seen engagement rates rise by over 100%.”
“In a way, we are going back to the beginning – the original story, 20 years ago, when Steve Kaufer had the insight to create a place where people, spending their hard earned dollars on vacations, can get a sense of what they are going to get. It was very empathetic to the needs of travellers.” – Lindsay Nelson, TripAdvisor
The inclusion of professional travel content in the revamp has also been welcomed. “It adds weight to our content and people want a balance of professional content and user reviews,” she said.
She also feels there is a world of difference between reviews and reviews. “One or two lines and a star rating does not make a review. That’s why we have a minimum-character for our reviews because we want more subjectivity, more individual context,” she said.
Asked if consumers would continue to contribute reviews without expectation of compensation – given how we have seen the rise of content creators being paid big bucks for their “influence” – Nelson believes that “the people who review on TripAdvisor are more about paying it forward and has nothing to do with compensation. They want to get connected with the broader travel community and share it with the business.
“There’s the community element in TripAdvisor that is not there in tech companies.”
Being human-centred vs machine-centred to drive relevant personalised experiences
Nelson also feels that the online travel world has been driven too much by performance marketing in the last 20 years and that there is an opportunity to build a strong consumer brand which is human-centred versus machine-centered.
“Most of the major online travel brands see themselves as tech companies, not travel companies, while TripAdvisor has always seen itself as the world’s largest travel website,” she said.
“With machine learning and tech, it is possible to drive unique personalised experiences but we have to find a way to make them relevant, make them human-centred. Now it’s machine-centred and it’s aggregated opinion.” – Lindsay Nelson, TripAdvisor
It wants to go beyond machine learning and tech to “drive personalized experiences for every traveller”. That means more than 500m travellers. Is this possible, I asked?
“With machine learning and tech, it is possible to drive unique personalised experiences but we have to find a way to make them relevant, make them human-centred. Now it’s machine-centred and it’s aggregated opinion.
“How can we add a human opinion and build a human-centred platform? We might for example ask you for your preferences and surface those ideas. That way, we develop brand preference, brand love and a great consumer experience.”
She believes that in this regard, “no one can do it better than TripAdvisor” with its millions of reviews and community of travellers passionate about sharing.
Her role at Core Experience, she explained, is to essentially help drive direct domain traffic, engagement and frequency, build loyalty, improve depth and breadth of use, and eventually monetize that engagement and loyalty.
“Brand work will contribute towards that goal. We are also working on a mobile strategy, loyalty programme and smart CRM recommendations. The cumulation of those initiatives will produce the desired result.”
“There are still no great travel planning tools that glue it all together. People want a balance – they want to plan certain things in advance and a list of things that they might want to do. So you need a balance of flexibility – you want to be prepared but you don’t want to be over-scheduled.” – Lindsay Nelson, TripAdvisor
On the product side, she said that TripAdvisor was working on creating a planning tool that would “have enough structure to allow freedom and spontaneity”.
“There are still no great travel planning tools that glue it all together. People want a balance – they want to plan certain things in advance and a list of things that they might want to do. So you need a balance of flexibility – you want to be prepared but you don’t want to be over-scheduled.”
There is currently a beta product which allows users to create a Pinterest-like board of saved reviews and articles.
“It is complex producing product design at this scale especially when you have to fit in to a mobile device,” said Nelson. “If you don’t win in mobile, you can’t win in travel.”
Why superapps are successful
Commenting on the rise of superapps in Asia, she commented, “Just having adjacent products is not enough. There has to be inter-connection between the capabilities – that’s where you see the success.
“For example, if it’s payments that’s providing the connectivity, or messaging, or loyalty, that is what is making superapps successful.”
She cites Tencent as a company that led the way in starting with messaging and then finding a way to link that between users and different business models. “The instinct is to put a number of different things on the shelves – that’s not solving a real consumer problem.”
“This is a trend line we’re seeing, they are now willing to pay whereas before they were not. Someone needs to pay for quality content, which is why we are seeing the rise of subscription businesses. This is great for journalism.” – Lindsay Nelson, TripAdvisor
She knows that travel struggles with high frequency usage but TripAdvisor’s extension into restaurants and Experiences, as well as Viator, has provided meaningful traffic sources and “the more opportunities you have to build a relationship with the customer, the better”.
One trend she’s excited about in the media industry is the consumer willingness to pay for content. “This is a trend line we’re seeing, they are now willing to pay whereas before they were not. Someone needs to pay for quality content, which is why we are seeing the rise of subscription businesses. This is great for journalism.”
Could TripAdvisor move towards a subscription business? “If you build a loyal, highly engaged audience that cannot be disintermediated, then you have plenty of other opportunities to monetise,” said Nelson.
She is aware of the challenging road ahead as she tries to connect the dots of the different business units that make up TripAdvisor but she is undaunted. She says she has youth on her side. “I want to drive interesting change, this is not a sunset career and TripAdvisor’s impact is pretty substantial on travel.”
• Featured image credit: TripAdvisor