Tripadvisor just turned its user reviews into a new brand with a whole lot to say

Fast Company

3 days ago

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.
The last time Tripadvisor launched a meaningful brand refresh was in 2020. The timing, of course, couldn't have been worse.
'We have the new assets of that brand refresh for the first time in airports in April of 2020 [when] there's like 18 people walking through the airport seeing this thing,' Matt Dacey, Tripadvisor's chief marketing officer, recalls to Fast Company.
But five years later, it's trying again—with new lessons about how people travel today.
The pandemic 'fundamentally changed how people thought about travel,' Dacey says. Tripadvisor has seen a rise in bookings of vacations associated with sports and other events, with customers often speaking highly about tour guides they had on their trips. The emphasis on standout tour guides could mean that today's travelers are looking for human connections and local experiences. Tripadvisor seeks to capture that sentiment by making user-generated content (UGC) central to its brand.
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.
Arthur Foliard, a brand designer and executive creative director for Koto, tells Fast Company that user-generated content also provided the inspiration for the brand's refreshed and expansive secondary color palette. The agency used an internal tool to upload photos, pull out the three most important colors, then simplify those colors into flexible palettes that can be used for different travel locations and seasons.
'We liked this idea that if you were in Tokyo during cherry blossom season, then you would have a completely different color, or the vibe of the brand would be very different than if you come here to New York right now,' Foliard says.
The brand refresh is just one outward sign of a larger company effort. Tripadvisor has refreshed its app, is fine-tuning its use of AI, and, Dacey says, will launch the largest global travel membership program in the world in the third quarter of 2025.
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