TripAdvisor hits 75m reviews and opinions 12 years after launch, that’s 5.7bn words

Founded in 2000 at the height of the original dotcom boom, TripAdvisor has grown to become one of the world’s most recognizable online travel brands. And today it has announced that it has just sailed past 75 million travel reviews and opinions, up from 50 million last year.

Earlier this year, we delved deep into the goings-on at TripAdvisor, exploring where it’s going with social and mobile. Indeed, TripAdvisor and Facebook have been cementing relations over the past couple of years, and it only recently rolled out ‘Friend of a Friend’ recommendations in cahoots with the social networking giant.

Other key milestones TripAdvisor reports include:

• “32 million marketable members” globally, up from 20 million one year ago.
• Fifty contributions are being posted to the site each minute, double last year’s figure.
• TripAdvisor now carries more than 11 million user-submitted images, up four million since last year.
• 56 million people use the site each month – a figure TripAdvisor cites as  making it the largest travel site in the world.
• TripAdvisor now lists 610,000 hotels, 880,000 restaurants and 200,000 attractions, 50% more total properties year-on-year.

So what does 75m reviews and opinions translate into? Well, that’s a whopping 5.7bn words, in case you were wondering. The longest ever review was for the Kandholhu Island Resort & Spa – amounting to just over 9,000 words. Now that’s a beast.