Enjoy Your Trip: Review websites

Do you use TripAdvisor? Do you post reviews to it? Do you take notice of reviews on the site? Do you put reviews on other sites or are you guided by what others might say? Are your reviews potentially defamatory? Do you know that, in the UK at any rate, you might end up facing legal action if you do so?

The fight back has started. At a so-called “masterclass” in London, arranged by TripAdvisor with the intention of showing hotel and restaurant owners how they can make the most of the website, the whole thing turned into something of a fiasco – those owners expressing their anger as to how TripAdvisor goes about its business.

In fact the fight back started some while ago. In the UK, since 2008, misleading reviews, i.e. those which, for example, come from a hotel itself and masquerade as independent opinion, can be subject to naming and shaming by trading standards or even court action. It hasn’t helped that much. There are PR companies who will sort out good reviews, there are hotel or restaurant businesses who will give “incentives” to get good reviews. There can also be a whole load of family and friends only too happy to oblige. Users of sites – consumers, travellers – are being taken in.

Then there are the negative reviews. TripAdvisor says that it has ways of combatting them and it points out that has its “owners centre” through which responses can be made to negative comments, but this hasn’t satisfied owners who have seen their businesses’ reputations being dragged through the mud of cyberspace. The anger has given rise to the anti-TripAdvisor site – ihatetripadvisor.org.uk. The power of the negative review is such that owners can be subject to blackmail in order to stop bad comments.

TripAdvisor is singled out because it is the biggest and best-known of the review sites. It isn’t the only one of course. Far from it. There are so many reviews, opinions and comments plastered across Lord knows how many websites, it is a wonder that anyone has the time to ever go to a restaurant or take a holiday as they are spending so much of it on reading what can be misleading, malicious, ill-informed, gushing, potentially fraudulent. The wonder is that anyone takes any notice of any of it, given how unreliable it seems.

Recommendations from “real” people can be hugely powerful, as indeed can criticisms. This is why so much prominence is granted to sites such as TripAdvisor. The Spanish director of the site revealed earlier this year that a well-known but unnamed hotelier places more importance on the opinions expressed rather than the categorisation system that TripAdvisor has.

But the potential for abuse is enormous. Which is why a group of 700 businesses is considering a group defamation action against TripAdvisor, and why individuals can be liable to action against themselves if they’re not careful.

There is now advice being given to site users so that they can try and sort out the reliable and honest wheat from the ill-formed or misleading chaff. One piece of advice is that if several reviews all make similar observations, then the information should be ok. Maybe so, but there is an undeniable tendency to the me-too about much that is posted. It is the curious psychology of online communities, one of reinforcement. One person slags off or praises to the hilt and others follow my leader; they don’t want to be left out. And the reverse psychology, as it were, occurs when someone takes umbrage at this groupthink, which can then have the effect of reinforcing even further the initial line of argument. How dare anyone disagree?

I have recently seen a particular restaurant coming in for some harsh comment. As it so happened I was at another restaurant, two doors down from the one in the spotlight. I mentioned to someone who works there that the restaurant more or less next door has got a poor reputation. “Really? I like it. Food’s always good. It’s always packed. People wait on the street to get a table.” And this was from someone who is a chef in a rival establishment. Go figure.

The worst aspect of all this isn’t that a business can be brought to the point of ruin by bad reviews, deliberately arranged or just because, well, the place is no good or, for whatever reason, people don’t like it. This is bad enough. But more than this is the fact that we now seem incapable of making choices of our own. Everything is decided for us. By people we have never met, who don’t know what we really like, but in whom we invest colossal and utterly ludicrous amounts of credibility. Which country we might go to, which resort in a country, which hotel in a particular resort, which restaurant or bar, which this, that or the next thing.

Why bother going on holiday any longer? You can just stay at home and spend your week or fortnight reading the reviews. About as exciting as being on holiday, given that the spirit of adventure or the unknown has been lost. And even if you do go on holiday, how do you spend your time? Must tell everyone how good/bad it is. Go to sites x, y and z. “Hotel’s brilliant/rubbish. Restaurant’s outstanding/awful. Resort is fantastic/dreadful.”

Once upon a time holidays were there to be enjoyed. Of course there were bad experiences. So you never went back. Of course travellers and consumers did not have the “empowerment” of the internet to voice their discontent or their praise. Fair enough, but behind any comment, good or bad, can you be really sure as to its authenticity, as to how accurate it might be, as to how simply nasty it might be? You can’t. Information isn’t everything, and nor is having the whole trip advised.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Enjoy The Trip: Trip Advisor and other websites

Having mentioned Holiday Watchdog yesterday, time today to give Trip Advisor its place in the blog’s sun. It is the most important of the holiday (and restaurant) review sites, but it is not – in my opinion (and opinion is what matters) – the best. On the principle that a website should be simple to navigate, Trip Advisor gets my thumbs-down; it’s not a patch on Holiday Truths when it comes to user-friendliness and simplicity. But Trip Advisor is on a rather grander scale – it is international, and it has its own director in Spain. He was interviewed yesterday in the “Diario”. It is also, or has been, more susceptible to the owner-inspired (written even) glowing review, which was why the British Government legislated against such a carry-on.

Talking to the site’s Spanish director is an example of how well the “Diario” does tourism and the business surrounding it, and the most interesting aspect of the interview was – if dealt with only briefly – the revelation that a well-known (unnamed) Mallorcan hotelier considers opinions posted on Trip Advisor to be more important than official categorisation, the number of stars and whatever.

It had been, before I did the Bellevue interview last summer, my impression that no one much in Mallorca took any notice of sites like Trip Advisor. No one much in terms of hotel managements, tourism authorities, town halls and so on. I would still be surprised to learn that the latter two do take any notice, but the hotels are a different matter. Well, Bellevue was, and the then assistant director was. He’s no longer there. But Trip Advisor was on his favourites list (or possibly his un-favourites). It was important that it was, given the fire panic of last season.

The drawback with any site such as Trip Advisor, and any forums elsewhere and also Facebook and the rest, is that opinion is just that – opinion. By its nature it is subjective, unscientific; it is also just the tip of a very tall iceberg when it comes to the actual numbers of holidaymakers who ever go on to such sites. Should anyone take any notice therefore? Yes and no. Yes, because opinion can carry a lot of power, despite its subjectivity. No, because this opinion cannot really be challenged (and Trip Advisor has rules as to how hoteliers can respond, as was pointed out to me by the Bellevue assistant director) and because there isn’t a “profile” of the person placing the opinion. You might know their sex, their date of birth, their home town, but none of this tells you anything meaningful. This just adds to the unscientific nature of the opinion generation.

Nevertheless, the reviews and comments on sites are being taken seriously, in some quarters, testimony to the power of the internet. It’s those quarters that don’t take them seriously or just don’t even look at them that concern me, which brings us back to the tourism authorities and the town halls. I have said this before, but it bears repetition, and that is that these bodies should be devoting time and resources to monitoring to what is being said on the internet.

Were they to, they might actually learn something. Or be prompted into some course of action. They have a vast market research resource at the click of a mouse, and you doubt that they exploit it. More fool they.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.