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TripAdvisor Adds Restaurants to Its Award-Winning Travel Research Site NEEDHAM, Mass. --(Business Wire)-- June 30, 2004 -- First Travel Search Engine to Combine Restaurants with Destination and Hotel Information for Smarter Travel Planning and BookingTripAdvisor, the leading travel research site, announced today that it has added restaurants to its site to further help consumers with their vacation planning and reduce the risk of making a bad travel purchase. Similar to its hotel, attractions and city sections, TripAdvisor's new restaurant section gathers online articles, guidebooks and web postings about a given restaurant, allowing travel consumers to review and compare multiple points of view on the quality and value of that restaurant. TripAdvisor is the first travel search engine of its kind to combine unbiased information from around the web on hotels, destinations, attractions and now restaurants to give consumers a comprehensive set of research tools for planning and booking all of the most important aspects of a vacation. Starting this month, consumers visiting TripAdvisor.com can access restaurant listings for more than 40,000 restaurants across the United States. Each listing will feature restaurant reviews from an array of sources: articles from top periodicals and guidebooks as well as net comments and user reviews from patrons who have actually dined at the establishments. Just as TripAdvisor ranks the top hotels with its proprietary Hotel Popularity Index, TripAdvisor now ranks the top restaurants for a given city based on the quantity and quality of information available about that restaurant on the web. With this ranking of the most popular restaurants, TripAdvisor users can now reduce the risk of making a bad decision when faced with the daunting task of choosing a high-quality, enjoyable restaurant during their vacation. Launching first in the United States, restaurant coverage will expand in the coming months to various locations around the globe. With the addition of restaurants, TripAdvisor now offers a much more robust suite of vacation research tools. So, for example, when planning a trip to New York City, consumers can access information about the city at: http://www.tripadvisor.com/Tourism-g60763-New_York_ City_New_York-Vacations.html. Here, they can view travel information on vacation packages, most popular hotels and top attractions. Now, in addition, users will be able to see the most popular restaurants in that city and access information about each by clicking on the Dining tab: http://www.tripadvisor.com/Restaurants-g60763-New_York_City_ New_York.html Restaurants are dynamically ranked by popularity based on the most current information available on the web. "Whether to celebrate a special occasion or simply to sample the local flavor, enjoying a meal at a well-chosen restaurant can be a priceless part of a vacation," said Steve Kaufer, CEO of TripAdvisor. "Just as our consumers want to know they're choosing a high-quality hotel, many want to plan ahead to ensure that their dining experience will meet all of their needs. By adding restaurants to our site, we've given consumers one place to find all of the unbiased opinions important to their travel planning. We'll continue to add features like restaurants to our site to make TripAdvisor the most comprehensive travel research engine for smarter vacation purchases." About TripAdvisor TripAdvisor, Inc. provides a comprehensive travel search engine and directory that helps consumers research their travel plans via the web. TripAdvisor.com is the 7th most popular travel website worldwide, according to comScore Media Metrix (May, 2004), and has won dozens of awards, including PC Magazine's Top 100 Web Sites and Forbes Best of the Web. The company also offers travel suppliers a performance-based marketing medium that generates average click-through rates of over 10% per page. Partners include leading travel companies such as Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz, hotels.com and American Airlines. TripAdvisor is a wholly owned operating business of IAC/Interactive Corp (Nasdaq: IACI) and is part of IAC's Local and Media Services Group. For more information, visit http://www.tripadvisor.com/. |
