Hotel and accommodation review sites
February 25th, 2007 | 
Author: 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.
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An interesting article,indeed. As a member of the trivago travel community and having been in the hotel industry for many years, I have to absolutely agree with you. This is also why we attempt to combine reviews from a variety of sources at trivago, ranging from expert opinions to the insights of our members, before calculating a rating for accommodation establishments, attractions etc. Although trivago offers online-booking functionality, we also provide travel guides, photographs, links to relevant websites and generally attempt to render unbiased information about establishments and global destinations.
Just to respond to your comments on the rating system on Hostelworld.com. I am the Hostel relations Manager in hostelworld.com and just want to explain how it works. Customers get the opportunity to submit a rating and optional comments once they have checked out of a property. We don’t delete reviews but hostel managers do have the right to edit / remove comments if they are inappropriate, offensive or contain bad language. The hostels rating % is never affected by this and will remain the same.
Arnold, I’ll be interested to see what happens with a negative review which I have just submitted to Active Hotels. I booked a hotel in Norfolk through them to stay last weekend and it was very disappointing although it had received an average 8 out of 10 from 15 reviews on Active Hotels, I would score it at 2 or 3.
I agree with Pierre that you have to look at a variety of sources and then make a judgement.
Carmel: It’s true that the ratings are not affected by whether or not a particular comment has been enabled on a HostelWorld site. However, the comments are completely under the control of the individual property which creates a certain bias towards more positive comments on the sites.
Karen: ActiveHotels/Booking.com seem to put on all the comments and ratings received. However, they warn the hotel if there’s something unduly negative that comes in. It still goes on though and with no facility for commenting on it by the management. Therefore you get daft comments like some of those I’ve mentioned above.
What’s really needed is some third party to review the reviews ie not the guest and not the hotel management. The problem is that the people doing that kind of thing (Michelin etc.) sometimes sail off into la-la land too. For instance, we were quite shocked to read the review of one hotel round the corner of us. Along the lines of “average rooms, dismal restaurant with no atmosphere” whereas in fact the restaurant is excellent and very good value too.