Out Of Nowhere, TripAdvisor Becomes One of Facebook’s Biggest Apps

Over June, the Facebook app of travel reviews site TripAdvisor has increased its Monthly Active Users (MAU) by over 67 percent. It now has 31 million MAU, moving it up to fourth on AppData’s Facebook Apps Leaderboard – just above the ever-popular MyCalendar birthday app and Zynga’s top ‘Ville game CityVille. What makes it even more intriguing is that in May, according to InsideFacebook (a sister site of AppData), TripAdvisor experienced “a steady decline.” So how has TripAdvisor not only stopped a decline, but added 12.5 million users in the space of a month?

The growth has been particularly rapid this past week. According to AppData, TripAdvisor’s Facebook app was the top gainer across Facebook last week with 6.2 million new MAU. That’s a 25% gain in just one week.

TripAdvisor is one of my favorite travel websites. I use it to choose hotels, before I travel. That’s because it has a vast database of user-generated hotel reviews and its ranking system is slick and dependable. Also, unlike Orbitz, TripAdvisor doesn’t penalize me for using a Mac.

TripAdvisor released its first Facebook app back in June 2007, called “Cities I’ve Visited.” This is the very same app that now attracts 31 million monthly active users, although now it’s simply called TripAdvisor (a separate app called Cities I’ve Visited