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TripAdvisor is a magnificent application that serves a wide variety of purposes. It becomes one of those almost indispensable applications on everyone's smartphone. Want to find a restaurant nearby? Want to find something different to do on Sunday? Want to schedule a flight for next week? Want to plan a business trip? Want to plan that trip you've been saving for years? Want to know if a certain hotel in São Paulo is good? Whether it is worth eating at such a restaurant in New York? Whether a museum in Paris is a good program? Or even if a famous tourist spot in Singapore is a tremendous stolen one? TripAdvisor came about with this mission: helping millions of people around the world to plan and experience a perfect trip through tips and recommendations from people who have already been to their chosen destination. In just over a decade it has become an essential and definitive resource for people looking to enjoy unforgettable moments while traveling. TripAdvisor is more than recommended. It is free and available for Android on the Play Store.

The story

It all started in 1999 when Steve Kaufer and his wife, Caroline, decided to take a tourist trip to Cancun. After returning from a travel agency with pamphlets and prices for three hotel options (economical, moderate and luxurious) to stay in, they turned to the Internet to deepen their research and decide on the best choice based on what other people had to say about these establishments. And they quickly found that the sites showed basically the same pictures and descriptions. In the face of this enormous frustration, Steve, who was a computer engineer graduated from the traditional Harvard University, gathered some friends, among whom Langley Steinert, Nick Shanny and Thomas Palka, raised money (approximately US $1.3 million) with some investors, and in the February 2000 he founded TripAdvisor (something like a Travel Advisor).

The idea was to create a website that did not follow the traditional travel guide model to adopt a more informal posture. In it, internet users themselves could comment on the services of hotels, airline companies, car rental companies, restaurants, museums and tourist attractions, among other places that a tourist would surely need at some point during their trip. After months of hard work, the site went live in October of the same year. The stylized owl in its logo had an explanation: in the history of mankind, owls symbolize knowledge and wisdom (often portrayed as great counselors). And that was precisely the mission of TripAdvisor.

The tourism business has changed radically in the last decade. Nowadays it is almost unthinkable to book a plane or a hotel without consulting the Internet. In fact, 82% of Spanish travelers go online before booking a hotel, according to a study carried out by the consulting firm PhoCusWright.

Tripadvisor plays a very important role in all this radical change in the industry. Stephen Kaufer is the founder of this website dedicated to travel, which is defined as the 'largest in the world'. It is not for less: today its value in the stock market amounts to 11,500 million euros. Born in 1999, its success is based on the comments made by other travelers about the many places that the site talks about.

The idea of ​​TripAdvisor arose when Kaufer and his wife went to a travel agency and when they went to check on the web what each place they were thinking of going was like, they only found aseptic descriptions of the hotels and other establishments themselves. Together with a team, a company was founded then that, at the beginning, offered its own reviews of the establishments although the real business, as has finally been verified, was in the criticisms of the users themselves.

Today TripAdvisor dominates the Internet travel industry. Its influence is enormous and can change the price policy of hotels, which previously had the upper hand and now must manage their online reputation in the best possible way. Not surprisingly, today it is possible to know if the receptionist of this or that hotel is an edge with a simple click.

Why is this website so influential? Mainly because of its traffic: 315 million unique visitors per month, who can read 200 million comments and opinions of travelers on 4.5 million accommodations and restaurants. Its weight in the sector translates into money. It had a total turnover of 1,115 million euros in 2014, almost all advertising, and obtained a net profit of 200 million euros.

At TripAdvisor, a start-up that started in 2000 with seven employees and now has more than 2,700, advertising is almost the only source of income. Its three modalities are: Pay per click of the companies with which they link (six out of every 10 dollars arrived this way in 2014), annual subscriptions of companies to differentiate themselves (25%) and banners (13%).

Many of the tough questions the company faces are also questions about the nature of the trip itself, what it means to enter unknown territory, interact with strangers and place trust in them. These are all things that are also done online - it is no coincidence that some of the first analogies we have already used to talk about the digital world ("information superhighway", "electronic frontier") tended to belong to the vocabulary of travel. In that sense, the story of TripAdvisor, one of the least examined and most dependent technology companies in the world, is something of an internet parable.