Varden Hotel Study Shows TripAdvisor Business Listings Generated Surge in Quality Leads in 2010 with 4,150% ROI

Independent Study Shows Business Listings Yielded $50 in Incremental Bookings for Every Dollar Spent While Delivering Traffic that Visited 28% More Pages on Varden Website and Had Significantly Lower Bounce Rate than Other Sources

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TripAdvisor

Mar 22, 2011, 08:00 ET

NEWTON, Mass., March 22, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- TripAdvisor®, the world's largest travel site*, today announced that The Varden Hotel, a European-style boutique property in Long Beach, Calif., is seeing a very high return-on-investment and highly qualified traffic from TripAdvisor Business Listings. Business Listings allows properties to directly connect TripAdvisor's community of millions of researching travelers to their website and other channels, converting potential customers to paying guests.

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As reported in a March 2011 Forrester Consulting study, "The Total Economic Impact™ of TripAdvisor's Business Listings," Business Listings resulted in "a very positive 4,150 percent risk-adjusted ROI [return-on-investment], and a very quick payback period – within one month" for Varden. The study projects that over a three-year period, Business Listings will provide risk-adjusted incremental bookings of $76,558 on a $2,250 investment.

The Forrester study, which was commissioned by TripAdvisor, also reports that Varden has experienced excellent results for Business Listings on key website measures. First, visitors coming to Varden's website from Business Listings looked at an average of 4.26 pages per visit, while visitors from all sources looked at an average of only 3.33 pages. This is a 28 percent increase in the number of page visits for visitors originating from Business Listings.

In addition, the bounce rate -- defined as the proportion of visitors who enter a website then leave without visiting any additional pages -- for traffic originating from Business Listings is substantially lower than it is for other Varden traffic. The Varden's website has an average bounce rate of 32.39 percent as compared to a 12.65 percent bounce rate for visits originating from Business Listings. According to the digital marketing company that tracks the effectiveness of marketing being used to drive traffic to Varden's website, this indicates that Business Listings sends highly qualified and interested visitors to the hotel's site.

"The bottom line is that we definitely get more customers overall from TripAdvisor Business Listings, there's no question," said Varden co-owner Larry Black. "We've had a huge number of guests that have posted on TripAdvisor, and we were constantly hearing that they found us on TripAdvisor or heard about us through TripAdvisor. I'm not sure why every hotel doesn't do this."

"The Varden Hotel has done a great job tracking their Business Listings performance so that they understand the outstanding value of their investment," said Christine Petersen, president, TripAdvisor for Business. "We're pleased to be working with this award-winning property on Business Listings, and we look forward to hearing about more strong results from them in 2011."

For more information about this and other Forrester Consulting studies on TripAdvisor Business Listings, please visit the TripAdvisor for Business blog.

About TripAdvisor

TripAdvisor® is the world's largest travel site, enabling travelers to plan and have the perfect trip. TripAdvisor offers trusted advice from real travelers and a wide variety of travel choices and planning features (including Flights search, TripAdvisor Mobile and TripAdvisor Trip Friends) with seamless links to booking tools.

TripAdvisor® Media Group, operated by TripAdvisor LLC, attracts more than 50 million unique monthly visitors* across 18 popular travel brands**. TripAdvisor-branded sites make up the largest travel community in the world, with more than 40 million unique monthly visitors***, 20 million members, and over 45 million reviews and opinions. The sites operate in 28 countries worldwide****, including China under daodao.com. TripAdvisor also operates TripAdvisor for Business, a dedicated division that provides the tourism industry access to TripAdvisor's millions of monthly visitors. The division includes Business Listings, which allows hoteliers to connect directly to millions of researching travelers, and Vacation Rentals, which helps property managers and individual home owners list their properties and showcase hotel alternatives.

TripAdvisor Media Group websites have been recognized as top travel resources in 2010 by Conde Nast Traveller, Good Housekeeping, TIME magazine and Travel + Leisure.

TripAdvisor and the sites comprising the TripAdvisor Media Group are operating companies of Expedia, Inc. (Nasdaq: EXPE).

TripAdvisor and the TripAdvisor logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of TripAdvisor LLC in the U.S. and/or other countries. Other logos or product and company names mentioned herein may be the property of their respective owners.

*Source: comScore Media Metrix for TripAdvisor Media Group Sites, Worldwide, August 2010

** In addition to TripAdvisor, The TripAdvisor Media Group of websites includes: www.airfarewatchdog.com, www.bookingbuddy.com, www.cruisecritic.com, www.everytrail.com, www.familyvacationcritic.com, www.flipkey.com, www.holidaylettings.co.uk, www.holidaywatchdog.com, www.independenttraveler.com, www.onetime.com, www.seatguru.com, www.sniqueaway.com, www.smartertravel.com, www.travel-library.com, www.travelpod.com, www.virtualtourist.com and www.kuxun.cn.