During my trip to ITB Berlin and the PhoCusWright Bloggers Summit, I meet Ulrike Pithan (P&R manager for Trivago).

She give us some informations about Trivago and their new service for hoteliers: trivago hotelier

>Ulrike, can you tell some information about you and Trivago?

Trivago was founded in 2005 by Rolf Schrömgens, Malte Siewert and Peter Vinnemeier. Their concept was to create a site where travellers can find all the information they need to plan their trips and share their travel experiences with others. Over the years trivago has developed a 45,000 strong European-wide community. Apart from travel reports, guides, tips and reviews trivago offers an extensive hotel price search engine which enables travelers to find ideal accommodation at the lowest available rate in 265,000 hotels worldwide. I joined the trivago team about a year ago and am very happy and excited to work in an international young team of 21 employees where new ideas are always welcome.

>Can you give us some highlights and stats about Trivago and the Trivago travel community!

The site currently stores 150,000 hotel reviews, 1.6 million photos and information on 50,000 tourist attractions, generating 2.5 million visits and over 10 million page views a month. The trivago community is involved in the content management of the site: it takes over administrative functions, sets up criteria for the content gathered on trivago and it engages in its own projects, like the collection of geographical data on trivago. As a member on trivago your level of responsibility rises with your amount of activivity and your level of experience.

> Tourism is a people business and a destination experience with personal encounters. Do you think the community can leverage a destination or a product thanks a web site and tools like Trivago?

Absolutely. trivago offers independent travel information and first-hand experience to travellers which will, of course, influence their travel decisions. You get the whole range of information about a hotel or destination on trivago: reviews, travel guides, pictures, the hotel's catalogue text and reviews of external sources, all gathered by the community. Interestingly tourist offices have realised the influence of travel portals like trivago on regional tourism and have started recommending trivago to their customers.

>For community travel and hotel user reviews, do you feel something is different between the european customers and countries.

The trivago community regards itself as international. Members of trivago communicate cross-nationally with each other and discuss ideas on trivago. It's rather the concept of trivago that unites them than their nationality. In our regular international online surveys we are always suprised though about the divergent results. These reviews often show how national tastes for travel can differ. Our most recent survey on holiday sicknesses revealed that only a third of British and French travellers feel fine while on holidays and that the French suffer most from depressions on holiday.

> Some news about Trivago for France market?

Trivago France recently launched our new service for hoteliers: trivago hotelier (www.hotelier.trivago.fr or www.hotelier.trivago.com). With this service we want to give hoteliers the possibility to react to hotel reviews, to state their own point of view and get into contact with guests. Hoteliers can write about news and offers in their hotel blog, upload as many pictures as they like and manage the information about their hotel on trivago.

Thanks Ulrike.

My thoughts: very intelligent move this service for hoteliers.

I guess they will love it compare the TripAdvisor process ;-)

If you want to dowload the Trivago french presentation for hotelier, Download file">it's here (sorry in french)