Cutting through the fluff is one of the issues with USG, another is the lack of a single “voice of authority” — the voice of a writer who really knows their material.

Sure there’s a benefit to reading through a dozen user-reviews on a specific guesthouse or hotel, but a researcher — one who has looked at and reviewed hundreds (or thousands) of places — will be able to write a review in context — and that’s often far more useful than three-dozen shrill comments raving that XYZ Guesthouse is the best thing since sliced bread.

We (www.travelfish.org) run our original reviews and let users then add to them — a review with a dash of USG. With reviews of over 3,000 places to stay in our sphere of coverage (SE Asia), we’re easily the most comprehensive site online, with the added bonus that we’ve visited every single place we list.

USG has its place — as a supporting source of information — but that’s all.

Trust — fair point — that’s why it’s always a good idea to use a source where you know the writers review properties anonymously and accept no form of gratuity for coverage — positive or not!

Should writers accept freebies or not? — there’s an idea for a future entry on Travel Rants

Happy X-mas

Good article although personally I’m getting a little skeptical of UGC sites in the travel world, as the article calls it. Many of the experts on front page of Mapsack are travel professionals, each with their own agenda - many of them have something to sell.

We resisted the temptation of a rating system on our Holiday Pad blog for several reasons, the main one being they are hard to determine what is genuine or not. I am becoming less a fan of review sites with exception of http://www.supermarketwine.com

Unlike Stuart’s superb TravelFish, we haven’t visited all the places we publish, we have some but that’s not what our project is about. It’s more about curating a collection of cool accommodation ideas, similar to product blogs as Uncrate.com and MightyGoods.com (where Holiday Pad draws its inspiration).
We’ve also resisted any form of affiliate marketing and the dreaded Adsense.

In terms of review sites, one of the experts on Mapsack is the guy from Travel Intelligence. An interesting concept: hotels reviewed by leading travel writers (and of course, they make money when we book any of the hotels through their site). But there’s a conflict of interests here. Do they write less than flattering reviews? Probably not.

I’m amazed and I completely disagree with you guys about user generated content. Web 2.0 is about giving people the opportunity to have their say, and opinion, in the case of Travel 2.0 that’s hotel reviews etc.

Getting a professional writer to review a hotel is defeating the whole purpose of Web 2.0 Can you imagine people trusting Trip Advisor, if they employed travel writers to review hotels rather than the holidaymaker, who is frank, honest and reliable.

Okay, your going to get the cases where hotels are writing reviews to raise their score, but that is why you should visit various hotel review sites to get a good cross section of reviews for the hotel your thinking of booking.

One thing we may work towards with mapsack is to seperate the professional and user content more. I personally think the professional content has a place in allowing people to find relevent information quickly and then use the user generated content to back it up.

One thing I am quite excited about is using a ‘trust score’. For each comment and review, there may be a button asking if it was useful. The more useful comments or reviews a user writes, the higher their trust score becomes. The trust score is cleary shown next to their postings helping the user see how reliable that text is.

What do you think?

Sorry about any spelling mistakes, I am on the road and using a funny keyboard layout!

Oh, merry Christmas by the way!

Alastair, wouldn’t a trust button just be another layer to get in people’s way?

Personally, separating the professional and user generated content poses a tricky dilema and think of the overhead designwise, not to mention the potential confusion for your audience.

I think a decision has to be made early on: who or what is Mapsack for?

From your homepage I’m still not sure what Mapsack actually is, or what it does, and I regard myself as someone who is culturally aware of the new internet and all its social promise.

OT: is the 1st pic above of Sveti Stefan in Montenegro?

sorry, i meant the 2nd pic.

I thought that the advantage of soclal networking sites such as Gusto was that you had more information about the person who had written the review. You could read their profile and get a feel for their personality and judge if there were on the same wavelength as you. as supposed to a review by a totally unknown person, for example on Trip Advisor.

I agree that if you read several reviews on various websites you can hopefully get a balanced view. However they do say that people are far more likely to want to spread the word when they have a bad experience than a good one.

Hi there, sorry for long delay, been traveling!

@garri:

For mapsack we feel that expert content is the essentially the ‘preface’ for information about travel opportunities. I.e. people might zoom round looking for interesting places based on expert content and then find more nearby information suggested by users.

Experts can be members who have given back to the site with good quality reviews and posts, or e.g. travel operators who know their locality very well. Of course, there are questions about the neutrality of the experts, but you could say that about any UGC. And, we monitor expert content to prevent over advertising.

Yes, a trust button would add another layer of user interface, but I personally think its one that has a direct payoff and is worthwhile. I think sites like trip advisor would be much better with this tool.

Your right that we still need to focus the site more (in particular the homepage).

Thanks for the input!

Alastair, I’d be very careful about adding more layers of UI. Less is more, remember?

The reason why 43 Places works is because everyone is an ‘expert’. There’s no us and them, if you know what I mean? Perhaps your experts should be known as ‘professionals’. (just a thought)

As far as focussing goes, it’s something we’re also mindful of for our own project. We have 2 new services currently in production and the challenge was how to tie them all in seamlessly to our blog. We think we’ve cracked it but you never know until you unleash things and see them work in the real world.

Good luck with the project.

What a bunch of nerds