Can TripAdvisor.com be trusted?
CLIVE DORMAN
REAL STORY: The Rees in Queenstown has suffered from reviews written about a different hotel that were mistakenly posted.
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OPINION: Since it was founded in 2000, TripAdvisor.com has revolutionised the way people buy travel online by giving them access to reviews of accommodation providers around the world by other ordinary consumers.
TripAdvisor took buying hotel rooms out of the stone age where you had to rely on pot luck, the word of friends who had been there or a trusty old travel guide like Lonely Planet to strip away the advertising hype and give you a true rating.
But it has always been a leap of faith to trust that TripAdvisor's consumer reviews were the real thing. At first, there were allegations that hotels were manipulating the system by "planting" positive reviews to counteract the honesty of damning consumer opinions. Now the discussion is about whether the opposite is happening.
The latest controversy erupted after TripAdvisor.com named a hotel in Singapore the worst in its 2011 list of Asia's Top 10 dirtiest hotels. The New Paper in Singapore reported that Goldkist Beach Resort's manager, Vikas Gupta, last year wrote a letter to TripAdvisor and Expedia Singapore inviting the online hotel review site to inspect the resort and subsequently remove it from its list of dirtiest hotels.
"The negative reviews on TripAdvisor continued to give us problems," Gupta said. "Thereafter, we decided not to continue loading room inventories into Expedia.com.
"Not long after, our guests started calling and emailing us to say their positive reviews on Goldkist were not appearing on TripAdvisor. Also, when I replied to some of the negative reviews on TripAdvisor, they were not published."
Gupta said Goldkist had also received an email from TripAdvisor asking the resort to "sign up for an annual subscription" and join its business listings. "On many online forums, hoteliers had said that once they paid the subscription, TripAdvisor would remove the negative reviews about them," Gupta said. "Perhaps if we subscribed, we wouldn't be listed as the dirtiest hotel in Asia." Annual and monthly subscriptions are capped at a fixed amount and are tiered according to the number of rooms and the hotel's location. Depending on hotel size, annual subscriptions range from $US360 ($NZ474) to $10,500 ($NZ13,838).
According to The New Paper, TripAdvisor denied Gupta's claims, saying its hotel ratings were not tied to business listings. More than 1000 hoteliers around the world have threatened to take legal action against TripAdvisor for damaging their businesses with allegedly malicious and unfounded reviews.
The lawsuits are being pursued by KwikChex, a British "reputation management" company, on behalf of a group of clients. A founder of KwikChex, Chris Emmins, said the company estimated there were at least 27,000 legally defamatory comments on TripAdvisor - "allegations that are false and should, if necessary, be tested in court".
The New Paper submitted a positive review about Goldkist to TripAdvisor. Two days later, the newspaper submitted a negative review about Goldkist, using a different username. The next day, the negative review was published on the website without any verification email from TripAdvisor, the paper says.
As for the positive review, TripAdvisor sent two emails asking for verification, asking: "Is this your review? Action required." The recipient had to click on a link provided in the email to verify that he or she wrote the review. The newspaper did so.
The latest Goldkist review to be posted on TripAdvisor labels the hotel "a disgrace to the nation".
Other travel booking sites have also got in on the reviewing business, but they, too, haven't been far from controversy.
A hotel in Queenstown has just discovered that travelocity.com mistakenly put bad consumer reviews of an American hotel under the wrong name. The error has been rectified but not until well after the damage was done.
It seems to me that consumers will react with great anger should they discover they've been lied to or deceived by any website that has put itself out there as a punter's pal, when in fact it was just a sharp business, complete with the necessary morality bypass. The danger of that is that consumers, especially travel buyers, have never had so much power and they will have no hesitation in acting collectively to destroy cheats.
Who are the websites you trust to consult before buying travel? Are there other reliable ways you have to make sure you're not going to be dudded? Have you come across instances where a hotel that was recommended has turned out to be a hole?
- © Fairfax NZ News
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Trip Advisor encourages guests to blackmail hotels. If the guest does not get deep discounts, they write a negative and destructive reviews. Trip Advisor publish bad reviews in an hour time while good ones never see the light of day unless you subscribe (bribe) Trip Advisor. It is true that if you consult TA on what is a good hotel, you'll get the good hotels, however, The bad hotels can be just as good but they did not pay TA to show them on the good list. That how they do business and make profit. The hotel can either pay-up or appear on the worst hotel list and might as well close its doors. Which would you choose?
1. We are thankful to Trip Advisor for awarding us honor favoring us significantly by: a) Despite the stiff competition with a mere 10 reviews in 2010 (total 41 in 4 years) they declared us winner of the award. b) in order to justify our award they had to Pick up few reviews selectively from other popular website www.agoda.com which accept reviews from paid guests only and has 56 reviews for us and their score for us is 5.5 over 10 rating us “ABOVE AVERAGE”. Another neutral website hotelcombined.com (which don’t sell rooms even) has also ranked us with score of 2.6 over 5 with rating us “#136 out of 202 most popular hotels in Singapore”. c) Not allowing satisfied users to post their positive reviews on their website. d) Not publishing the management response to reviews on their website e) Using the picture which is 2 year old when we were under renovation. f) A voting/rating system which only they understand and is not transparent. f) Specifying us in a much smaller category e.g “Speciality lodging category having 60 properties” while two other similar chalet in Singapore are put in hotel category having 246 properties. g) Even in Speciality lodging category one other hotel is ranked #53 but we still can be winner of honor despite being #52. h) bypassing us from many hotels listed in Singapore (leave aside other countries) itself on their website with much more terrible reviews or a worse ratio of bad vs overall reviews. Again good jump queue for us
2. We are thankful to some reviewers especially; a) One reviewer who posted the review on 27 Jan 2011 mentioned they stayed 2 years before) but don’t know where to post while they have been TA member since 2nd October 2009. Her period of stay is stated to be Feb 2010 in same review by herself. b) Other reviewer also posted the review on 30 Jan 2011 while said to be stayed in March 2010 and member since 14 Dec 2009 almost putting a review about a year after of stay. What is odd behavior about this is that they wrote the review after 1 to 2 years of stay ! and not one but some of them. How many of us will wait for 1 to 2 years to write review. c) One more reviewer himself admitted that he never stayed. It can be further questioned how many reviewers there who have not admitted to staying did or did not stay at our property. d) and very few others who did it for either some misunderstanding or over expectations. e) Our special thanks to one news reporter who tried to testify the truth of reviews by putting a positive and negative review on their site and admitted that only negative review appears on tripadvisor and positive review donot appears at all. f) We are sorry about our 1000s of satisfied users reviews has not been able to make in this hall of fame entries as they were not qualified (being positive was their only disqualification).
If interested, know more details on www.goldkist.sg/mgmt.html Disclosure: Author is working for Goldkist beach Resort. .
NBC in America recently did a piece on not just misleading or accidentally mis-posted reviews, but actual fake reviews on TripAdvisor.
Those of you who consider TripAdvisor reliable: have you ever stayed at a place that had primarily negative reviews? Because those are the places that this article is talking about. If you only stayed at places that had positive reviews and had good experiences, that doesn't contradict this article at all, but you may be unfairly excluding other good accommodation from consideration.
I take any online reviews with a grain of salt. There is too much opportunity for disgruntled associates of any business to publish fake reviews, good or bad.
Trip Advisor should be taken to court.The reviews are posted at Trip advisor's arbitary dictatorial power and many positive ones are not posted while negative ones are posted immediately.Its not Trip's decision to post or not to post.They should post ALL reviews.When you phone them,there is no answer and they say it is random.It is actually drive -by slander with no consequences for Trip..They will deny it but if you subscibe to them,your positive ones will appear quicvkly and the negative ones randomly disappear. Hotelier's should start a class action suit .Tripadvisor is JUST another business and has NO right to slander other businesses.
Information Corruption is becoming more and more widespread - and the degree of sophistication in technique is climbing too. Review fraud (both positive and negative) is becoming far harder to spot. - and the only answer is going to be stronger verification to protect consumers and reputable businesses - especially smaller businesses that are extremely vulnerable to this type of attack.
The idea of TripAdvisor is initially good but why should I trust the advice of a stranger hiding behind a username? I've recently discovered kiwicollection.com, their ratings are made by experts who visit the hotels regularly.
I have seen some comments posted out of spike, as the client did not get what he asked for - for free, of course. Comments are good, but why people still stay in the hotels if its so bad and make ridiculous remarks thereafter. Check out and move on..... lots of choices out there.
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Golgkist is the worse chalet I ever stay in my life the room there is a nightmare.