About us

Contact us by email: lovelypeople@triptiv.com

Who we are (and who we aren't)

We are Cat and Rob - two travellers from the UK who have recently finished a round-the-world trip, mostly spent in South America. We realised while traveling in Bolivia that in areas where many very similar tours are offered, it is very difficult for travellers to make a good decision about which company to go with. It was hard for us to find useful information and most reviews we came across were not quantified in any way, while those that were used different ratings systems from one another, making it very difficult to compare providers. So, we decided to transform these jumbled up opinions into something that could easily be combined to give a clear idea of how good a provider really is, while collecting our own reviews at the same time and presenting information from the providers themselves.

Cat on the Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia	Rob in the Cordillera Blanca, Peru

We aren't trip providers - or the owners or operators of any travel services whatsoever. Nor are we out to make money by exploiting/tricking travellers or providers: we tell it exactly as it is.

What we do (and what we don't do)

We collect together reviews of trip companies from loads of different sources (guide books, blogs, review sites, forums, etc...), organise them coherently, and summarise and quantify them to tell you which trip providers are currently getting the best feedback from travellers. We don't get involved in the agreement between you and the provider you choose.

We list ratings and reviews from people who have done the trip or reviewed the provider. We don't endorse their content, or write reviews ourselves.

We keep everything up-to-date. We don't include old reviews; we aim to show you only how the companies are doing right now - the only time you care about.

We encourage trip providers to provide information about themselves and their prices. We don't endorse any company over another or guarantee that the information they provide will be correct.

We provide links to other useful places on the web to help you plan your trip. We don't endorse their content, or have any association with their operators.

Sometimes it may be necessary for us to translate, edit or summarise reviews or descriptions; when we do we try to keep as close to the original message as possible. The author(s) can always contact us if we get it wrong.

What do the numbers mean?

We use three numbers to quantify how well a provider is currently performing according to reviews. They are:

• Rating as a percentage
  This percentage is an indicator of provider performance, derived from reviews. The higher the percentage, the better they perform in the reviews on average. To see how we calculate it, please see rating reviews.
  
• Weight
  This number is an indicator of the confidence you can have in the review(s) of the providers. The higher the number, the more importance you can place on the corresponding review/rating. To see how we calculate it, please see weighting reviews.
  
• Number of reviews
  This states how many reviews are listed on Triptiv for a certain trip provider. The higher the number, the more opinions the overall provider rating includes, and therefore the more accurate it is likely to be.

For the purposes of comparison we also use select other information:

• Comparison price
  We quote a price in large text for the purposes of comparison, and state the type of trip this corresponds to immediately below, but most providers offer other types of trip as well. Click on the corresponding 'more info' link to find out prices for other types of trip with this company. The price is quoted in the currency that the trip operator uses.
• Comparison trip type
  Most trip providers also offer many other types of trip, in most cases we list a standard popular trip type, but sometimes that isn't possible.

Currency codes: BOB = Bolivian Bolivianos; CLP = Chilean Pesos; USD = United States Dollars;

Rating reviews

To transform diverse wordy opinions into a clear-cut score that gives an indication of how good a provider really is, we derive a percentage score for each provider, based on what the reviews say about them.

When we collect Triptiv reviews this is super-easy to do: we just collect them using our rating system.

When we derive a score for reviews from other sources, it gets a bit more involved. We consider how well the reviewer says the provider performs in terms of fun, interest, value for money, staff and safety. We then work out an overall score for a provider, weighting the scores from each reviewer according to the reviewer's weight. This gives a numerical rating for each provider (and each review) which makes everything a lot easier to compare!

Obviously, if anyone wants to talk about the rating we've projected for their review, they can contact us.

Weighting reviews

When we arrive at a percentage score for a trip provider, we want to make sure that more credible reviews carry more weight. So, we derive a weight score for each review, according to the trustworthiness of the source, and the quantity of relevant information it contains. For example, a review from Lonely Planet would have a higher weight than an identical review from a TripAdvisor reviewer. Also, a review containing information about each of the five main review categories (fun, interest, value for money, staff and safety) would have a higher weight than one from the same source containing information about only, say, two categories.