Online travel review site Tripadvisor said Tuesday it had reached one billion user reviews, five years after the site topped 500 million reviews.
Tripadvisor, founded in 2000, allows users to post their reviews of hotels, resorts, B&Bs, short-term vacation rentals and vacation destinations, as well as restaurants.
The company claims its users write reviews that are three-times longer than reviews on other travel agent websites and search engines, with the average length of an accommodation review at 688 characters.
Its longest English language review ever written was a 17,241-word review of the Hotel Playa Pesquero Resort in Cuba.
Tripadvisor said the most-reviewed accommodation in its history is the Luxor Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, with more than 48,000 reviews to date. The most-reviewed restaurant ever is Pasteis de Belem in Lisbon Portugal, with almost 53,000 reviews. The most-reviewed attraction ever is the Basilica de la Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, Spain, with over 164,000 reviews.
Not all reviews can be taken seriously, or at least reviews from travelers who didn’t quite get the iconic places they were reviewing. Tripadvisor’s favorites:
- New York’s Empire State Building: “Building is too tall, meaning I felt sick as heights aren’t my favorite thing.”
- San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge: “First off, it is not golden in any way — it’s an ugly brown color.”
- The U.K.’s Stonehenge: “Why people come from all around the world to see a pile of stones, I will never understand.”
- Arizona’s Grand Canyon: “I’ve been to a number of so-called landmarks in my time — but what the hell was this? Just an overblown sandy ditch.”
Tripadvisor is a litmus test for the travel industry, hit hard by the pandemic. Since March of 2020, Tripadvisor said more than 350,000 business reviewed on its platforms have been reported as closed, though not necessarily all of them due to the pandemic. It also said in that same period, more than 1.26 million new business listings have appeared on Tripadvisor.
