Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Internet is a great place to search for a perfect hotel room. Many hotel reservations websites offer to travellers the possibility to write reviews of the hotels they stayed at, which help others decide which hotel to book for their next trip. While many of these reviews are helpful, there is a great share of extremely bad or extremely good reviews which make us wondering about their authenticity.
TripAdvisor removes slogan
The most recent blow to the authority of travellers' hotel reviews is the decision of the leading travel review website, TripAdvisor, to remove their slogan 'reviews you can trust' in favour of a new slogan 'reviews from our community." In the official statement, TripAdvisor claims that their decision was based on the fact that they would like to stress the importance and the commitment to the community in their business model. However, the real reason for their decision might be elsewhere.
It is a well-known fact that some hotel owners have been publishing extremely good reviews about their properties and on the other hand, some guests (or competitors) have been publishing extremely bad reviews only because they wanted to trash the place for various reasons.
Millions of faked and misleading hotel reviews
According to the online reputation company KwikChex.com, up to 10 million reviews at TripAdvisor are faked and the website is currently being investigated by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) following thousands of complaints from hoteliers about allegedly misleading and fraudulent reviews.
And while fraudulent reviews from hotel owners or their competitors are deliberate, many travellers trying to write a helpful review don't even realise that their reviews are actually quite misleading. People like to talk about the hotels they stayed at, but they talk about them from their very own perspective.
When it comes to reviewing hotels, one needs to keep in mind the standards that can be expected at a certain property. It is unfair to review a three-star hotel according to five-star hotel standards. And this is exactly what happens on TripAdvisor and similar travel websites. Business travellers for instance, who are used to five-star comfort, and are forced to downgrade to a three-star hotel either because of bad economy or for other reasons, will typically write a horrendous review of the three-star hotel despite the place might be excellent for its category.
Other travellers for instance get angry at the reception either because the staffs don't speak English well or because they are not as friendly as they expected them to be. Next thing they do is log on to TripAdvisor and write an extremely bad review, despite the hotel room itself might have actually been quite comfortable.
The bottom line is: always take hotel reviews written by the travellers with a pinch of salt and compare them with reviews from other, more reliable sources.