Foreign Perspectives

The issue of sites posting guest reviews of accommodation has been picked up by Karen over at Europe A La Carte.

Most of the debate to date is on the issue of hotel owners posting bogus and glowing reviews on the likes of Trip Advisor but I suspect that they are few and far between. Looking at it from the other side of the fence so to speak, there are equally problems of negative comments by guests who have never even stayed or who, when something goes wrong, blame everything on the hotel.

Consider a few of the examples that we have seen over the last year.

1. “…in the middle of nowhere…” . It’s certainly quite true that the hotel was in the countryside and not in the city. The guests in question hadn’t even bothered to read the first line of the description which quite clearly states that yet they blamed the hotel for not being in the city-centre location that they really wanted.

2. “…the hairdryer in the room had quite a smell when used…”. They were using the room heater to dry their hair and the smell was their own hair being burnt.

3. “…they didn’t know when we were arriving…”. Not surprising in that the reservation system they’d used doesn’t ask them that question and therefore the hotel don’t know when to expect guests that have used it.

4. “…all the restaurants were closed when they said they’d be open….”. From a guest who hadn’t changed the time on their watch when they arrived in France with the effect that every time they turned up at “1pm” for lunch the restaurants were closed as it was actually 2pm.

5.”…the reception staff weren’t French…”. Try booking into a London hotel and finding any English staff!

Many review sites make checks that the guests have actually stayed there but Trip Advisor appears to take anything that comes with no checks at all. We’ve seen “interesting” reviews by people who clearly have never stepped inside the door or, if they have, must have been high on something given the list of things they saw which didn’t exist in reality. We’re not talking debateable issues like whether or not the place has been dusted but things like broken windows which clearly aren’t broken.

The review facilities run by the likes of Booking.com are in a different league. To my mind, the problem with them is that they generally don’t offer a facility for hotel management to comment on the reviews made. Since they also clearly have an interest in getting people into their hotels, the tendency is to allow management to have the negative comments deleted. Now, this gets rid of the idiotic comments as above but it also potentially allows unscrupulous hotels to artificially bump up their ratings by getting rid of the really negative comments (although, one hopes, that a genuinely bad hotel wouldn’t get away with that). Probably the most extreme example of this is HostelWorld (used by Ryanair and very popular) where the management can select which reviews and ratings they’d like to appear (they can’t edit them) so, naturally, it’s possible to manipulate your rating and some places would appear to do that thereby getting a rating of close to 100% vs a more reasonable 70-80%.

So, yes, let’s see if we can get rid of the bogus reviews but let’s not limit it to those of owners/managers who are inflating their rating but also the overlly negative reviews of unreasonable guests who blame everything that goes wrong on everyone else.

How to do that is the big question though. Anyone can create a hotmail account and get a review onto many sites without any confirmation that they’ve actually been a guest there. It’s clearly not viable for the majority of Internet sites to actually visit the hotels being commented on yet some kind of cross-check is definitely required and, at the moment, many sites don’t appear to even read the comments before they put them on.

Popularity: 4% [?]

We’re just getting organised for a trip to Belfast next week and have been pricing the flights on Skyscanner as that’s a much, much easier way to pick out the cheap flights compared to trying to do it directly on the Ryanair site.

As usual, it’s cheaper and more convenient for us to fly out of Carcassonne and back to Girona. Most people wouldn’t think of doing that as the historic assumption has always been that return flights are cheaper. That was certainly true in the days before discount airlines but although discount airlines will normally let you book a return ticket, in practice their flights are actually priced as one-way.

So, in our case, if you were flying from Dublin to the Pyrenees, the cheapest thing to do is usually to fly from Dublin to Girona and then fly back to Dublin from Carcassonne. The one complication in this scenario if you’re coming here is that international dropoffs of cars can be expensive so you need to price in that aspect of your trip before committing yourself to booking the flights. However, there are other pairs of airports in the same area where flights in one direction are substantially cheaper than those in the other direction so it’s worth spending 20 minutes or so looking at alternatives to simple return flights.

Another aspect of this is that you can often find that the flight times are more convenient to other airports in the same area in one direction but not in the other one. For instance, we find that the flight from Carcassonne to Dublin departs around 1pm so we can get to Belfast easily enough that day. Coming back, the 6pm flight to Girona is also handy for us as we can also do Belfast to Girona in one day vs the 9am departure for Carcassonne which would require a night in a Dublin hotel.

Don’t forget that Ryanair charge 4.50‚€ for each item of checked luggage these days (it’s more if you don’t declare the bags online in advance) and that the limit is now 15kg per person of checked luggage, 10kg per person of carryon (don’t forget to get some luggage scales to take full advantage of this). Possibly more significant is that children 2 years or older get a full luggage allowance and, crazy at it might appear, two adults with two kids can take 100kg of luggage with no overweight charges.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Popularity: 2% [?]