Generally, I would read a bunch of reviews from sites that I trust and compare. That way, if one company is trying to “cheat the system” on one site, you have others to fall back on.

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1) why does a reviewer have to stay at a place to be permitted to review it. Obvious example is guest makes reservation, shows up & finds property has misstepresented itself and chooses not to stay. Good grounds for a review I’d have thought.

2) on “verified stays” what about the thousands of places that do not take online bookings, are cash only and rely on walk in business only. Should they be denied the benefits of crowd sourced reviews?

3) on bad reviews, what about the goods ones, shouldn’t we be clamoring to establish the veracity of those too? A false review need not be malicious. Not surprisingly hoteliers are less concerned about these.

Ignore the best and the worst reviews and look for the middle ground. Look at other properties reviewers have written up to get an idea of where they’re coming from. Reviews when correctly used can form a reasonable starting point for selecting a property, but mistake to expect the site to do all the hard work for you. If you want that, use a travel agent !

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I’m actually a big fan of TripAdvisor, despite its obvious imperfections. When I was recently travelling and booking hotels typically one day in advance, I tried different strategies but one proved more time-effective and reliable than the others. I would check TA ratings for that town, find the highest rated place (preferred B&Bs/Inns to hotels) within our budget, and after checking a handful of reviews for that place I would email/call them to book. It saved a lot of time and we found some real gems along the way.
It’s not perfect but I would argue that TA does add a great deal of value to the traveller.

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@Stuart:

Regarding veracity – yes this needs to be applied to both positive and negative reviews. Currently, as far as I can tell there is no mechanism for establishing veracity of any review.

False reviews don’t need to be malicious – but I don’t want to read false reviews of any kind. I’m not asking consumer review sites to take the hard work out of finding a hotel – but I am asking them to be credible in ensuring that false reviews aren’t posted on their sites. If there are plenty of false reviews, the site has no credibility at all.

Nor do I find bricks and mortar travel agents to be much better – in general the travel agents I’ve dealt with tend to have little experience of actual travel and are little more than order takers. If you look carefully at what travel agents offer you (and what is displayed prominently in most travel agent stores), it’s the tours / packages / products which pay them the maximum commission. Any correlation between high commissions and what you actually want from a trip, is purely coincidental.

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Review sites are good if they have enough response volumes. Why for an example does one hotel with 900 5* /4* reviews get 6 1* bad comments? So you do need read between the lines.

@Mark. From what you have written I would say you have little experience with Travel Agents outside of main chains in the UK. Independents agents tend to be well travelled, the staff are over 30 as an average and have passion for there jobs….. Bit like comparing a supermarket meat section with a local butcher, the knowledge gap is massive. Chains are perfect for taking orders and dealing with there own products but have limited knowledge of the other 900 tour companies, destinations or even type of holidays outside of their limited remit.(of course I know a few exceptions on both sides).

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@Nick – I don’t actually use UK travel agents – I’m based in Switzerland! Seriously, I’ve given up using travel agents except one (Ozzie) agent / operator for our eclipse trips which take us to places with “unusual” visa requirements such as Libya and Tibet.

Nor do I find that volume of responses helps that much. The larger the number of reviews the less signifcant the statiscal outliers are. While most people are somewhere near the average (that is also true) the further you as a person are from the average, the less useful the average is.

I did a study last year on consumer review sites – taking a sample of 100 Swiss hotels. Between 22% and 47% of that sample had /no/ review on the platforms we looked at. Most major platforms make much of the /total/ number of reviews published but very little of the breadth of coverage (or apparent lack thereof)

On one major platform, the median number of reviews given for these hotels was 7 – which I don’t regard as significant, reliable or adding much depth. That platform had a large number of /total/ reviews but very few per hotel.

Furthermore, regarding “one hotel with 900 5* /4* reviews get 6 1* bad comments” we did, on one platform, discover a high positive correlation between the number of reviews left and the rating that the hotel got – but not on the others. That said, all the ratings we found across all platforms where strongly correlated with each other. Which suggests that the number of reviews is a confounding factor.

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If there’s no credibility in positive reviews then why on earth would anyone bother giving credence to someone giving a personal opinion on a hotel they never spent time in? TA did one good thing in having “quality specialists” come onboard, but maybe it’s too late in the day to salvage their reputation as an online source of reliable information on a property, aside from establishing the fact that the hotel is even open and functioning which is always a concern nowadays.

IMHO, the single most egregious group to abuse their access to online reviewing are some of the travel bloggers themselves – at least on this side of the Atlantic – who make a habit of trashtalking on their own blog a property after they”ve been comped stays there, then doing likewise on TA and similar sites. It’s ironic that people who are better suited to staying in $50 a night fleapits suddenly morph into connoisseurs of six-star standard properties on the rare occasion that a manager makes the unfortunate mistake of offering them a stayover.

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@Hal, the “quality specialists” was certainly a starting point for TripAdvisor and their ilk. But we still don’t really know much about the standards that they’re applying. How are they actually going about finding fraudlant (positive or negative) reviews? What do they do when a case of fraud is reported (beyond waiting for the threat of litigation)? Does the threat of litigation influence the removal of a genuine review?

It is this lack of transparency that fosters the lack of credibility.

That and the fact that just anyone can sign in and leave a comment.

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Hal – You’re very critical of travel bloggers’ reviews of their comp accommodation. What motive do you think we bloggers have for being overly negative in our reviews?

I try my best to write objective reviews of accommodation in which I stay, whether I pay for itself myself or it’s a comp. I aim to write a balanced review and offer constructive criticism e.g a Dublin hotel improved its breakfast buffet offerings after my review. Some criticisms I have e.g. expensive &/or poor internet connection may not be of any concern to other travellers. Using photos and videos in a hotel review also help readers evaluate your review.

For me it’s about building up my readers trust. I actually think that some bloggers don’t want to be critical in their accommodation reviews in case it jeopordises their next free trip.

Some PR companies get pretty annoyed if we bloggers don’t give their clients positive coverage but offering a free stay is not buying a positive review.

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Darren, interesting you noticed the trend towards positive reviews. This was something else I observed in the study I refered to earlier.

Two of the platforms had a 5-point scale. On one, 54% of the rated hotels had a score of 3.5 or 4. On the other, 49% acheived 4 out of 5 and 89.6% achieved 3.5% or higher. A third, using a 10-point scale had 53% of the hotels scoring between 7.5 and 8.5 Analysis of the average, median scores and histogram plots comfirmed the skews towards higher scores.

From gut feel, I had expected a bell-shape curved as (in my opinion) most places are, by defintion, average. We didn’t find this bell-shaped curve at all. Why this is remains, to me at least, a mystery – but I’m not one to fly in the face of public opinion with a good rant!

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I stopped using Trip Advisor when I found out that our horrible hotel was giving away gift vouchers if you left a review and emailed them with a link to the review. I now ask family and friends for their recommendations.

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Mr. Cronian,

No one said anything about writing “just positive reviews” at all. Certainly some travel bloggers could at least be objective and not pretden that everything is hunky-dory and roses when they get taken on press trips to very poor third-world countries and crushing dictatorships. Those are certainly instances where the truth and objectivity need to be maintained. Are they? And hotel reviews do connect to the wider social and political landscape in many such instances because usually there’s no middle class and it’s the wealthy oligarchies that control the local hotel industry.

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KB – If you read what I actually said, I wasn’t referring at all to “travel bloggers” to infer “all” travel bloggers, I said “SOME travel bloggers” and yes I do have SOME in mind and you are not among those. I agree with the rest of what you have to say and I haven’t read your travel reviews, so of course I wasn’t referring to them. You’re also right that “offering a free stay is not buying a positive review” but you’re referring to what should be a professional standard with integrity, something which certain PR firms and certain bloggers are totally bereft of.

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How on earth did people cope before the internet and travel review sites such as TripAdvisor! Maybe we could just ignore them and take a ‘risk’ occasionally. After all, isn’t that part of the fun of travel?

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I apologize if I sounded somewhat strong in my initial comments, I think there are actually several related issues involved in the whole topic of hotel reviewing and that makes it difficult to generalize briefly even for the sake of conversation. Additionally, there’s the distinction to be made between the instance of the consumer traveler leaving comments on certain types of sites like TA and the world of the travel blogger who’s possibly been commissioned to supply hotel reviews for another type of site. Both types of site are valid sources in somewhat different ways for the traveler planning a stay. The more rounded a view of things a reader has, the better informed their own decision can be.

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