trivago.co.uk > Reviews (26)

Trivago is yet another review site that allows you to make a bit of extra cash from writing. It is an excellent travel web-site offering a reviews of an enormous number of hotels and tourist attractions from all over the world, with a useful search facility. It is certainly a good place to do your research when booking a holiday, but I shall review the web-site more from the perspective of its community and money-making opportunities.

Trivago is rather different to other review web-sites in that they publish the amount of revenue that they have received (from the sale of accommodation via booking partners etc.) during the month, and how much of it you are entitled to. 50% of the money is given back to the web-site contributors and your total number of shares and the resulting estimated payment can be accessed from your account at any time. To receive payment you will need to become a member of the web-site, but you can earn money from a variety of activities other than just reviewing hotels and attractions; uploading photographs, rating review and photos, adding hotels and attractions to the database and other database maintenance also receive payment in the form of "shares" (at time of writing 1500 shares was worth approximately £1.00):

Add a photo to an attraction (about 75 shares)
Rate other peoples' photos (2 shares)
Rate an hotel or attraction review (2 shares)
Add hotels, attractions and external links to other reviews (about 600, 150 and 250 shares)
General web-site administration (various amounts)

Photos are easy to upload, and if you cut down the file size and have a fast internet connection you could upload quite a few in a short time, but you do need to find the appropriate attraction or hotel to add them to first and add a comment and date to each one. Reviews can be briefer than you might publish here on dooyoo, but you could still reuse a review from here. In addition to the text you will need to fill in various forms describing when you were there, the purpose of the trip, food quality etc.

As you gain more experience and more shares, your "job title" will change as you get promoted up the ranks and you will gain extra operations that you are allowed to perform and earn money for. I am a "Holiday Enthusiast" (Level 3), apparently, but the ranks are Sightseer, Excursionist, Holiday Enthusiast, Vacation Pro, Globe-Trotter, Discoverer, Administrator (Levels 7 to 9) The number of shares you earn during the month determines how much of the earned income will be received by you.

There is no fixed number of shares for writing a review or adding a photo etc. and the number depends on it's quality, but could it could be up to about 100 shares for a photo and a lot more for a review or attraction, although rating a photo or review gets you fixed number of 2 shares. The rating is a little strange and complicated in that an initial number of shares is allocated to the review, photo etc. then that number is multiplied by the average rating of the people who review your work, so the number of shares received will vary from day to day until the end of the month when the shares are converted to a payment.

In a typical month you would require about 1500 shares to make £1 so twenty photos or about four brief hotel reviews could gain you £1, but you would need to rate 750 photos or reviews for the same amount.

This is a reasonable way of making money, it's fun and if you have a lot of digital photoseasily uploadable to the web-site. The minimum payout is 25 Euros or approximately £24.99 which could take a while to achieve. Payment is by Paypal or Moneybookers and there is a 1 Euro charge.

This review is also published on Squidoo (with a comparison of other sites):

http://www.squidoo.com/makelotofmoneyfromhome