Another Option For Web 2.0 Aggregation

One of the hot sectors of hotel technology these days is Web content aggregation, frequently in the form of "dashboards" that crawl the Internet and let you know what people are saying about your hotel, and your competitors. 

There are a number of ways to do this on your own, for free—everyone knows to keep an eye on TripAdvisor, and I blogged about a few other options here awhile back. But I’d like to offer up another cool Web 2.0 aggregation tool I happened upon the other day.

Circos is a hotel (and restaurant) search engine that intelligently crawls Web 2.0—not only the review sites, but blogs and social media, too—then crunches the information and spits out a sort of meta-review. Consumers can then use Circos to search for hotels by location, amenities and pretty much any adjective they can think of. For example, say you want a hotel in Chicago that is both "affordable" and "classy" and also has valet parking. Well, how does Marriott Downtown Magnificent Mile sound?

Where Circos becomes particularly useful for hoteliers is with the function that allows searching by specific hotels. By pulling keywords from reviews, Circos makes certain assumptions (good and bad) about a given hotel and assigns it grades as a result. The technology is meant for consumers, of course, but by linking to each review from myriad sites, it provides a handy centralized view of your hotel’s online reputation.

Let’s take a look at one of my old employers, Radisson Hotel Milwaukee West. From aggregating reviews across the Net (these all happen to be from TripAdvisor and TravelPost), the Circos software concludes the hotel is clean, has good service, is comfortable, is nice and is in a good location; Circos gives the hotel an A- in all five categories, and if someone were to search for a hotel in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, with any of those attritubutes, up would pop the Radisson.

The Circos aggregation is by no means comprehensive—a less-than-stellar review I once posted about a Georgia motel (not on TripAdvisor) is missing from the Circos search, for instance. But it is free, after all, and while it may not paint a complete picture of your hotel’s Web reputation, it’s a pretty useful tool. It’s definitely easier than searching every conceivable travel site individually, and it’s more targeted than a Google search. 

It’s too early to tell whether Circos will catch on with the public at large as a means of selecting a hotel. As fellow social travel site upstart VibeAgent is finding, regardless of how good your idea is, it’s not easy to build a large following. But regardless, it can’t hurt to search Circos for your site and bookmark it. It’s only a fraction of the Web 2.0 due dilligence you need to be doing, but it’s a start.