How Does TripAdvisor Rate?
While booking accommodation for our trip Ally and I have relied extensively on hotel reviews from TripAdvisor; many, if not most, of our accommodation decisions are made with at least some reference to the site.
Tripadvisor, if you are not familiar with the site, allows guests to rate and review hotels in which they have stayed, and these reviews and rankings are one of the easiest ways to compare accommodation options in any particular city. VirtualTourist is a similar site, and many hotel booking sites (such as AsiaRooms and Expedia) have integrated user reviews into their booking engines.
These types of user-generated reviews are incredibly useful because the volume of reviews give a broad sample of experiences of all aspects of the hotel and they are written by ordinary, paying guests. Hoteliers appear to be well aware of the increasing reliance travelers are placing on TripAdvisor reviews, as is clear by the many hotels which take the opportunity offered by TripAdvisor respond to complaints or criticisms.
How TripAdvisor deals with reviews is crucial to its credibility. The blog Elliot suggests a critical review of a hotel in Minneapolis has simply, well, disappeared. You can read the full details over at Elliot, but the facts as they are portrayed by there are that a negative review, mostly concerning a restaurant connected to a hotel in Minneapolis, was posted to TripAdvisor, the hotel responded to the reviewer fully and explained its position and asked the reviewer to consider reviewing or deleting her review. The reviewer considered doing so, but later found that all traces the controversial review had vanished, as if it had never been posted. Every hotel has the ability to respond to reviews on TripAdvisor – it is unclear whether this hotel sought to do so.
Similarly, it is not clear whether the hotel ever contacted TripAdvisor, or that TripAdvisor was in any way responsible for removing the review at issue. I hope TripAdvisor make some sort of response about the alleged disappearance. It would be disturbing for a review to simply disappear (unless where there appears no good reason to think it was fabricated or malicious. Whether or not anything untoward has happened here, the transparency of sites like TripAdvisor is sure to become a talking point in the future, as all such sites walk a fine line between the basically anonymous (and generally unsubstantiated) praise and gripes of reviews and the hotel industry who the buy the advertisements (or pay the commissions).
For me, the whole episode reinforces the lesson that the reviews and ratings from any website (or any source for that matter) must be treated with caution. I suggest checking as many sources of opinion as possible. Apart from personal recommendations, I prefer almost incidental recommendations in trip reports, blogs and such from identifiable people and, when it comes to review sites like TripAdvisor, I suggest the quality of the positive and negative reviews are more important than the quantity, click on the authors and check how many reviews they have written and of what types of accommodation and in which cities. Beware of those who praise too fulsomely or damn to strongly. Check reviews against user-submitted photos on TripAdvisor itself or Flickr, or video on Youtube.
I find TripAdvisor an invaluable resource, however, in future, i may treat it with more caution than I have previously.
Image Credits: Brent and MariLynn & kevindooley
Posted in: General Travel Resources
