When the first reviews went live on TripAdvisor, it was a small, unknown website for people to post their candid thoughts about hotels. Born in 2000 in the dot-com era, TripAdvisor was one of the first travel platforms for user-generated reviews on hotels, and later, restaurants, museums, the shop around the corner and so on. Encouraging honest, unfiltered conversation in the interest of travellers, the site grew swiftly. Today it has more than 600 million reviews from across the world.