A new development that TripAdvisor.com will announce today could make it easier for travelers to research an interesting hotel while potentially making TripAdvisor plenty of extra cash.  The popular hotel-review website will soon be able to add - for a fee - a hotel's direct website address, telephone number and email address to hotel listings, said Nathan Clapton, TripAdvisor's vice president of partnerships. Consumers will start to notice the additional information starting Jan. 4, 2010. Some 25 million people visit TripAdvisor each month, he said. Today, TripAdvisor users have to find the hotel's contact information on their own via a search engine such as Google.  TripAdvisor will charge hoteliers yearly subscription fees ranging from $600 for the smallest of properties to $15,000 a year to hotels with up to 1,000 rooms, Clapton said. With the economy squeezing hotels' business these days, TripAdvisor for now will discount fees by 50%, he said.  The direct connections could potentially give the hotels extra bookings, Clapton said, citing consumer demand.  They really want this information. In our one-click culture, we want to let consumers get directly to the property.  For travelers, the new direct-contact information will make it easier to quickly click on a hotel's web site to see if it looks as good as it sounds, review the hotel's official photos or email the hotel to request availability. Whether that convenience translates into bookings remains to be seen, but Clapton said it did during a limited test during last summer.  The hotels most likely to go for the new arrangement will be independent properties listed on TripAdvisor that are too small to manage internet marketing campaigns so crucial to steering business their way in today's world, Clapton said. Hotels that belong to big chains like Marriott, InterContinental and Hilton could also pay for the service, although the chains already advertise on TripAdvisor, he said. About 150,000 properties, or nearly a third of the total listings, fit in this category, Clapton told me.  "A lot of hotels can be booked on TripAdvisor.com, but this is the first time for a huge number of smaller properties that they can advertise directly on our site," he said.  Readers: Does this new development sound useful to you? How do you currently get TripAdvisor-listed hotel, inn or B&B's contact info?  To report corrections and clarifications, contact Reader Editor  . For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to  . Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to
Exclusive: TripAdvisor to add direct hotel contact information, which can speed your research - Hotel Check-in: A road warrior's guide to the lodging landscape - USATODAY.com