Feb 20th, 2007
Bogus Reviews
Travel Web sites clamp down on bogus reviews
Interesting read.
“He estimates that 1 percent to 2 percent of the reviews on SideStep and other travel sites are bogus. But he says the industry and users are aware of the problem and addressing it.”
In my opinion, the problem is that this 1 percent to 2 percent of bogus reviews is not distributed proportionally. I mean when a company decides to cheat and writes bogus reviews, they won’t write one or two… they will try to improve their rating as much as they can. It creates variations of relevance from a hotel (tour company, travel company, …) to another. Who should customers trust? It’s not always easy but most of the time they can find out!
Sometimes it could look like cheating is a fast way to grow your sales but I really think you should take this time to improve the quality of your services by reading the reviews customers wrote about your company instead… and take action!
I think your always going to get bogus reviews on any user generated website. I recently had a look through Ivebeenthere.co.uk which is a great site, with tons of tips, but some of the tips were obviously written by the travel company rather than an actual traveller.
I don’t visit just one review site when checking out a hotel. My first point of call is always Trip Advisor, but I scour the net for other reviews to get a really unbiased review of the hotel.
I read in the Times (UK) that there will be EU legislation in 2008 prohibiting this phenomenon.
@Darren : I do the same. I usually go trough 3 review sites (including at least a local one).
@Garri : Thanks Garri, here is the article : http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/02/14/eu_online_shill_ban/