Hundreds have registered for TripAdvisor webinar ... How about you?

The question we here at H&MM have posed to hoteliers around the world is, “What can TripAdvisor do for you?” And it looks like plenty of you want to find out.

As of today, we’ve had nearly 300 people register for our live chat with TripAdvisor to be held at 11 a.m. on Wednesday, Dec. 3. And if you still need to sign up, all you have to do is go to http://www.hotelmotel.com/TripAdvisorWebinar.

Inspired by a story I wrote on the impact of online reviews for our Nov. 3 special report “An Industry Connected,” we at H&MM came up with the idea to join our readers with the online reviews giant. Our goal was to put together a live chat with you and TripAdvisor to make sure there is an understanding of how reviews are posted, how hoteliers can respond and be a part of the site, and how others are using TripAdvisor listings to their advantage.

On hand we’ll have Brian Payea, trade relations manager for TripAdvisor, and Patricia Oliveira, hotel relations and fraud manager for TripAdvisor.

Payea’s focus at TripAdvisor is on opening communication channels with the travel industry and strengthening ties between the site and the hospitality community. His department is building new tools for hoteliers and other hospitality professionals to take advantage of the wealth of traveler-contributed information on TripAdvisor. Prior to TripAdvisor, Payea led public relations, marketing, government relations and investor relations at Internet companies including Zoom Information and Lycos.

Oliveira has grown TripAdvisor’s hotel relations and fraud team, helping to develop state-of-the-art fraud architecture that has allowed the company to more than double its year-over-year fraud catch rate. Prior to joining TripAdvisor, Oliveira held roles as a client services manager at Boston.com, a sales support manager at the Mathworks, and a customer service manager at Smarterkids.com.

I believe this will be a great event that answers a lot of questions on how online travel communities and user-generated content affect hotels. We’ll start off with a presentation by TripAdvisor and end the hour-long chat with a Q&A session.

Be sure to sign up today. And if you have any questions prior to the webinar, feel free to e-mail me at jkovacs@questex.com or leave a comment here.