Tripadvisor Just Turned Its User Reviews Into a New Brand With a Whole Lot to Say

Excerpt from Fast Company

The online travel company is using actual vacation photos and text from real trip reviews to inspire future bookings.

Tripadvisor is hoping a brighter green and accompanying brand refresh will inspire more travelers to turn to the company for experiential vacation bookings.

The online travel company, which announced 1% year-over-year quarterly revenue growth in May, traded its almost-pharmaceutical turquoise green for a more vibrant electric lime as part of a brand refresh with creative agency Koto Studio. The company’s logo, an owl named Ollie, remains, but he’s now animated with moving eyes.

Tripadvisor is also leaning into UGC for a new campaign. The assets are images like a selfie taken by a monkey or a shot of a kayak tipped in the water, and the result is creative storytelling from the point of view of the traveler, not the creative agency.

That makes strategic sense, considering how much consumers rely on reviews while planning their travels. In a 2019 TripAdvisor study, 72% of surveyed respondents said they always or frequently read reviews before making decisions about where to stay and eat or what to do while visiting a destination. “People trust people,” the report noted. Who better to tell a story than the person who was actually there?

“We just kept seeing image after image that people were actually putting on the platform that was far cooler than probably anything we could have come up with,” Dacey says.

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