Yes, these review sites are important. BUT, there has to be a bit of thought given to the protection of businesses that are afferted by the fake reviews. There are too many nutcases out there in cyberland who revel in weak, unprotected systems, inflicting untold damage to both businesses as well as website reputation.

I’m with you Darren, in that a friend’s recommendation, i.e. a ‘network’ of travellers who truly know one another is more trusted than a strangers thoughts.

Report this comment

The recent announcement that one of the UK’s tourist bodies, EnjoyEngland, is considering consumer views in its classification of hotels indicates that reviews could potentially have more influence than ever.

here’s the story: http://tinyurl.com/mgycu8

Report this comment

I think reviews are extremely important when booking hotel accommodations. As you mention, the level of trust is a lot greater when the reviews are coming from friends and members of my social networks. I trust those far more than blind reviews from other travelers. Generally I’ll ask for recommendations from friends via facebook or twitter prior to booking.

I find that tripadvisors reviews are mostly crap and to be taken with a grain of salt. It seems like most of the people writing reviews there have a different travel style to me anyway. For most trips, especially in cities…the quality of the room itself is of little importance. I just want somewhere comfortable to sleep, with low rates and friendly staff. I don’t care if the room is the size of a shoebox, or if the TV is tiny, or HBO doesn’t work.

I think it’s important to assess what your particular travel wants and needs are, and to focus on making sure the hotel meets your needs.

Also, I feel like there are always excessive negative reviews of high end restaurants. I think many of the people reviewing, don’t tend to frequent these places on a regular basis because the reviews tend to be “small portions” “very expensive” “had to pay for refills” Well, DUH!

Report this comment

Darren,

I mention trip advisor because it’s the biggest review site I can think of, not trying to single it out specifically.

I think reviews on large review sites like that have such a broad audience, can only help travelers in a broad sense. There are so many different types of travelers with different wants and needs, and large review sites like that aren’t very effective in determining if a hotel meets those needs.

For the very casual traveler, and a general overview it can work well..ie: “three people were shot on this property while we were staying here”

Personally, I’d rather seek out more specialized recommendations from smaller or more niche sites and networks, like bootsnall for budget accommodations or flyertalk for higher end accommodation. Not only do I get advice from travelers with similar interests, but it’s more of an engaging forum.

I’d rate my trust levels as following:
Friends>Social Network>Online Message Boards & Communities > Large Review sites such as trip advisor>Hotel Website.

Report this comment

Interesting discussion and I think Carla Young made a good point. What is important to one person may be less so to another and reviews can very much be based on one unfortunate incident. Also are people driven more to complain than to recommend?

Hotels should be able to comment on bad reviews or perhaps bad reviews should be allowed to drop off after 10 above average reviews or some kind of similar system.

Anyway, I think the tide is changing and as more people sign up to social networks they will become more likely to look for recommendations from their network. After all, a question like ‘Can anyone recommend a downtown hotel, not too expensive in Hamburg?’ takes less than 140 characters.

Report this comment

I think the fact that most of the relevant booking sites have started to gather hotel reviews on their sites prooves that subjective travel experience is wanted and relevant for the customer’s travel decision. Actually we have made an analysis of the hotel reviews on our site and found out that 74 percent of the reviews are positive (i.e. have more than 70 % out of 100 %). I believe that travellers rather talk about positive experiences than negative ones.

@Julie: We offer hoteliers the chance to react: In case that a review is negative, the hotelier is able to comment on the review on trivago. We have about 10.000 hoteliers internationally who registered for the service hotelier.trivago.com and use their presence on a social media platform for their own ends.

Report this comment

Great post, Darren – thanks for raising the issue. Just for the record, I trust customer reviews of hotels and travel experiences about the same as I trust customer reviews of financial services, customer reviews of major sporting events, customer reviews of political institutions, or reader reviews on Amazon… i.e. not much at all!

In my experience, TripAdvisor’s take on any specific hotel hardly ever matches up to reality. Yet those reviews stay ‘current’ for months or years – rather like Amazon, where someone can fire off a grouchy moan late one night, with a one-star rating attached, which then stays ‘current’ permanently and can drastically affect sales and reputation of both book and author – even if that grouchy moan is totally misleading and wrongheaded. (Yep, that’s from personal experience…)

Maybe my tastes in hotels and travel experiences are particularly individual, but I know what I like – and it basically never seems to match with what anybody else likes. I simply don’t want or need to know what Mr & Mrs Jones from Walsall think about Hotel X – no disrespect to Mr & Mrs Jones! For me, the joy of travelling is to make my own discoveries (and also my own mistakes). UGC is seductively, and unjustifiably, authoritative!

IMHO, professional opinion – from a travel journalist, online or on paper (newspaper or guidebook) – counts for more, since professionals have the experience and depth of knowledge to be able to compare hotels and travel experiences more effectively than punters – but even then, much travel journalism doesn’t float my boat… Sorry…

Report this comment

Holiday Watchdog are owned by Tripadvisor who is owned by Expedia, the online travel agent majority-owned by Microsoft.

FWIW Holiday Truths is a British independent site.

I read a hotel reviews like a child’s school report. Positive and negative points, most could do better but overall a good yearly report.

Report this comment

I think that there will always be a place and a need for hotel reviews on independent sites and I also agree that more people will combine those reviews with thoughts from their social media friends.
I use Trip Advisor regularly but am very particular to weigh up all comments and look at if the hotel caters to what I want first before deciding and so far all bar one selection has been great.
Happy traveling
Anne

Report this comment

@darren – Hi again – yes, you’re right, travel journalists frequently do their work on the back of freebie flights and rooms, but if you (not you, “one”) thinks about it, of course they do: how else could anyone afford to fund themselves to visit Easter Island, or Dubai, or even that posh hotel in Southport, if all they get in return is 250 quid for an article in the newspaper? It would be impossible.

But that’s the point about professional writers – just because they are on a freebie doesn’t mean that they automatically have to gush about how wonderful everything is. I’d be willing to say that at least 95% of all travel articles anyone has ever read have been funded by someone other than the writer or the publication – but 95% of travel articles don’t claim that everything is fantastic. Often the opposite!

Professional travel writers who stay in posh (or cheap) hotels and go on expensive (or cheap) guided excursions are doing a job of work. I’m writing this sitting in a large executive room in one of Switzerland’s top luxury hotels: it happens that it’s a good one, but I’ve stayed in plenty which are rubbish. Just because it’s free, has got a rainfall shower, and the B&O flatscreen telly swivels automatically on a motorized stand doesn’t mean they get a good write-up, or that I’m some kind of special guy who deserves to live the high life. It’s just a job.

Technology journalists don’t pay for their gear – they couldn’t: they’d never be able to pay their mortgage! They get everything free: and I’m glad they do, because it means they can compare products, get access to manufacturers and developers, get right inside the industry to identify what’s really going on, and then tell me what’s good and bad. Having prerelease products and the latest iPhone for them is a job.

Motoring journalists are the same: they don’t buy the cars they test-drive. Sports journalists don’t pay to go to football games. Music journalists don’t pay to watch gigs. And so on. None of that affects what they say about the products/services they are paid to write about.

These people are professionals, who work inside the industry in order to be able tell the general public what’s going on and give a broad perspective. Travel journalists are the same! That’s why, with respect all round, I’d read a hotel review in a professional outlet (publication/website) and not in a user-generated context. Unfashionable opinion, I know!

Some interesting viewpoints on this from Down Under: http://is.gd/1JRN3

Report this comment

Yes, all true. It’s a matter of what people are expecting alot of the time. Someone was misold a trip to a fantastic eco lodge we use alot recently and then ranted on Trip Advisor about bugs, availability of only local food etc…. when this is the whole point of the place. Fantastic place but not right for everyone. Being a small place, it only has a few reviews and suddenly it is very difficult to persuade people to visit. Very frustrating from our point of view as our customers have given it universal fantastic feedback. Great thing – consumer reviews – no doubt it has forced the hotel industry to raise their game sharply – but from a travel professional’s point of view – immensely frustrating that our opinion gets over-ridden by that of some random incoherent ranter from wherever….

Report this comment

@Matthew Teller. Great response, and a well-structured argument there. That’s actually served to change my mind in many ways. Thanks.

Report this comment

Hi everyone! It’s a really interesting conversation

I think the reviews are very good, and they can have a good point to make your decition, but somehow I agree with @Juile when she says “Also are people driven more to complain than to recommend? ” of course!!! you usually don’t remember to visit a website to say your hotel was great but you do it if it was horrible, you need revenge

Another thing is that it seems like there are too many reviews! Sometimes you have 500 reviews for one hotel! Who reads that?

People don’t trust them anymore. If it’s a good review they think someone from the hotel had done it and if it’s a bad one, people think it’s an specific situation that happened there.

All and all, I think in the the future we will only trust our friends recomendations.

Report this comment

@maria – certainly a few years ago (although this may fuel the fires of the conspiracy theorists) tripadvisor used to say around two-thirds of the reviews left on the site were POSITIVE.

So the rant-only theory doesn’t work here.

Report this comment

I don’t think the use of reviews will wane, at all. Just this morning I was thinking about planning a trip to Martha’s Vineyard. I haven’t been there in years and I haven’t a clue which town to look at and where to stay. My immediate impulse would be to check it out on TripAdvisor and then to call some friends.

I would be in favor of TripAdvisor implementing a verification system…..book your trip on Expedia.com Hotwire or hotels.com (or their international affiliates), which are all in the TripAdvisor family, prove that you stayed at the property, and then feel free to write a review. Perhaps there is another sort of system that would accommodate bookings from other sites, as well, for proof.

However, I don’t believe that TripAdvisor will implement such a system. First, most consumers are probably unaware that there is much of an issue with TripAdvisor — or other sites’ reviews. And, limiting the number of reviews would hurt TripAdvisor’s advertising/media business because diminishing the breadth of content would bring TripAdvisor more in line with lots of its competitors.

Great discussion here. I believe TripAdvisor’s reviews are very valuable — but you can’t rely on one source of information. Just as I wouldn’t rely on any one blog, even my own, or newspaper or TV station to keep up with the world. If you want to find out if a hotel or destination is cool, consult a myriad of sources.

Report this comment

I like the idea of time sensitive reviews that just remain on site for six months or so and also a summary of reviews to begin with, for instance: “This hotel has received 6 good reviews, 4 standard and 2 bad reviews in the past six months”

This would give an immediate impression and save hours of trawling through the type of ‘Mr Jones from Walsall’ reviews Matthew mentions.

Personally, I can not believe the amount of time and effort some travelers put into planning their trips. I tend to just book, turn up and hope for the best. It is all part of the adventure. Indeed, on the one occasion I referred to TA I just got so depressed that I didn’t book anywhere.

Report this comment

I agree with Dennis that user reviews are valuable but you can’t rely on just one source of information. Though as I explain below, I think that anonymous user reviews need to become a thing of the past as soon as possible.

Given the importance of the hotel decision to the reader/customer I expect that there will continue to be three voices talking about hotels just as there are three voices talking about most every product category on the web whether cars, books, laptops or cell phones: The professional reviews, the hotel itself (the manufacturer) and user reviews.

The hotel itself is used to talking about itself. Up until the advent of TripAdvisor, the hotels’ own voice was the dominant one. Their words and photos being sent out to the various players in the distribution channel (particularly travel agents – both online and off) and then rebroadcast nearly verbatim to readers/customers. Since a hotel is a product you can only see once you get there – and you can’t return it once you are there – that state of the world was a pretty attractive one for the hotels. User reviews helped change that but with their increasing pervasiveness (what hotel has not been user reviewed at this point) they became increasingly important to readers in their decision making process. Hotels took note and the natural derivative question for them was “how do I make sure to have good reviews on TripAdvisor”. Given the number of dollars at stake for the hotels, it’s only reasonable to assume that some percentage of hotels have taken advantage of the anonymous nature of TripAdvisor reviews and have placed positive reviews about themselves and negative reviews about their competitors. I personally think that TripAdvisor is fighting a losing battle until they remove all anonymous reviews from their site. For the user comments on our site, we plan to shortly (coming days or week as our engineering group is finished with the implementation) migrate to requiring the user to sign in with their Facebook account before we allow them to post a review. We fundamentally don’t believe in anonymous reviews. In a world where the value of the reviews is so large to the entity being reviewed, an anonymous user review is worth a tiny percentage of the value of a review where you can see the person making the comment.

The voice we at Oyster Hotel Revievs are working to fill is that of the professional reviewer. Instead of one person who has been to one or two hotels in the past year and has reviewed them ad hoc, our reporters go to almost 100 hotels in a year and review and photograph the hotel rigorously (we have a 60+ page hotel review manual that we train our reporters on). As with cars, cameras, computers and basically any other product category, because of Oyster the reader now has the option of reading a review produced by someone who evaluated the hotel in the absolute but also on a relative basis compared to its competitors.

Report this comment

I agree wholeheartedly with @Dennis Schaal! I remember my high school history teacher telling us never to take just one source of information as the “gospel truth” when researching. His advice was to check many sources and then form your own opinion. I think this holds true with hotel reviews.

I often hear from clients I read on ……., so, I do think reviews will always continue to be a valuable and influential tool in the decison making process.

It is also important to work with an experienced to travel professional who can assist you with your travel plans. They can often provide personal insight and experiences to help find the hotel that will best suit your level of comfort.

Report this comment

Elie makes some good points about phasing out anonymous reviews, although moving to a sort of Facebook verification system seems to be a stopgap measure at best. After all, there are tons of people who might have something valuable to say about their hotel experience who may choose to forego starting a Facebook account.

Yes, Oyster has initiated a very interesting experiment with its journalist reviews. But, as one pundit pointed out to me, Oyster will be hard-pressed to be comprehensive in its efforts. How will Oyster’s journalist team cover all of the hotels that people might be interested in in New York City and Chicago — and will they return to write a new review every few months to ensure that the past reviews they’ve written are still up to date? What about Paris and Amsterdam. It’s a big world out there with so many hotels.

So, I think, and Elie you agree, that user reviews will continue to play an essential role. The more I think about it, the idea of banning anonymous reviews to shore up integrity makes a lot of sense.

And, yes, Stephanie, I agree that travel agents can play an essential role. My Israeli cousin just emailed me asking me about suggestions for her trip from Toronto and a two-day drive stay through Niagra, Finger Lakes and Lake Placid to Burlingtonm Vt., in mid-September. It would be tough to get reliable information on all that in an easy way through TripAdvisor. And, I’m sure a travel agent could offer a lot of great advice.

Report this comment

Dennis – as you point out, there is only so much we can do. We are focused on leisure destinations and within those destinations, we don’t cover the Days Inn by the airport; we focus our resources on hotels that are very big decisions for the people who choose to stay there. As for recency, we do plan to go back but not weekly or monthly obviously. The structure of our review has us focusing, on purpose, on the parts of the hotel that don’t change weekly or monthly.

But even taking that into account, there are things that users can opine on that we just won’t ever have a meaningful opinion about. For example, catching that the chef in the restaurant changed because of a fight with management is something we will lag on relative to informed users.

On the flip side, the parts that we do are parts that no user really will want to do or should do; take 100s of photos, verify 100+ amenities through onsite observation, compare hotel X to hotel Y (relative assessments) etc..

We believe that we are an important addition to the information available to readers doing their research and so we are trying to make our content available for as broad a set of areas as possible. We are currently doubling the size of our reporting staff to 20 and will double it again shortly thereafter but even with that said, it’s going to be a while before we’ve covered Bali and we likely won’t ever cover the airport courtyard Marriott.

User reviews are an important resource – we just need to figure out a way that their value is not eliminated by their being gamed. Like you’ve said – there are significant limits to the Facebook approach that we have chosen to implement. But we’ve collectively read well over 100,000 TripAdvisor reviews (our reporters read the TripAdvisor reviews before they visit a property) so we have a front row seat on what is actually going on in there. Unfortunately, it’s too often not pretty.

Report this comment

Interesting discussion…

It seems rather silly to downplay the influence user generated content has on our daily decisions to go to movies, buy books, electronics, and hotel recommendations. It seems to me that TripAdvisor is singled out when it comes to fake reviews!? A movie producer would also play the reviews to get on top of ranks in the same way a hotel owner would do for monetary gain or so the claim goes. Yet, bad movies never seems to get high user rating or do well in the box office. The same holds true for hotels on TA; I’ve yet to see a hotel that is in the top 10 bracket that is really mediocre … People talk about fraudulent reviews and can, in some cases, point to a fake reviews (I have algorithms that detect some of those); yet nobody seem to be able show a bad hotel occupy #1 rank in a large city!? – In my opinion, these claims are unfounded and the UGC system is working pretty well.

As I digest the issues the people complain about in this thread as well as in other web sites; it appears to me that people are confused with one positive review followed by negative one … etc. Some people even had great experience in a hotel that was marked as poor on TA and other reviews site. To me there is a need to look at reviews in aggregates so that few opinionated reviews don’t draw an unfair picture in the travelers mind as they wade through lots of reviews. That’s basically what we do at raveable.com. At raveable, we process reviews from well respected sources like TA, TravelPost, MyTravelGuide, YahooTravel …etc to surface what travelers consistently rave or rant about. Think cliff-notes for hotel reviews.

One final note, despite the attack on UGC travel sites, their traffic growth in the recent months has been impressive. They definitely provide clear value proposition to consumers who flock to them each month.

@ Maria Martinez, since you complained about too many reviews. Let me know what you think of our summary of those reviews on raveable.com

Report this comment

I have travelled around the world, and I have never read one hotel review. Travelling is all about discovery, and you all forget that. Just once, book your vacation, go, and enjoy it and tell me if it makes any difference

Report this comment

No matter how many fake reviews the hotel has, the real reviews really show the truth.

Report this comment

Great article! As a professional travel writer for several guidebook companies, newspapers and my own blog, I’m constantly trying to figure out how useful “user” reviews really are. Personally, I think the idea situation would be to have trusted, professional journalists who live in a particular destination (or, if necessary, someone who travels there at least four times per year) to write about the hotels in that specific place. This allows them to develop a better sense of what is a “good value”, to be experts on how the hotels in that city compare to each other, and best of all, to be able to keep tabs (and check up on) any hotels that have been getting negative feedback from users.

A local professional who can weigh in on user comments is very important IMHO, because it’s difficult for most vacation travelers who travel to a place once to know how to properly rate a hotel.

Useful user review: “There is no one at the front desk between 11pm and 6am; if you need anything you have to call a remote site”. (the hotel failed to note this on their site)

Not useful user review: “This hotel is so cheap that the lights in the hallway aren’t always on.” (many European hotels use timers or light sensors on hall lights to save energy costs, it doesn’t mean they’re cheap)

Report this comment

[...] me, this is really the catalyst of this debate. A question I always ask in forums and on blogs. To no one surprise; nobody was able to show a single example of bad hotel on top of the rankings. [...]

Report this comment

[...] recently waded into a discussion on the fantastic Travel Rants website. Much to my surprise I then got a call from the producer of ‘Fasttrack’, BBC [...]

Report this comment