Review sites where customers can post their experiences are changing consumer behaviour and bringing a new level of accountability to businesses, but how do we trust the comments on which appear online?
Travel review site Tripadvisor is a good example of how consumers are able to spread the word about their good and bad business experiences, much to the displeasure of the UK hotel industry and its media friends. To make things worse, many of those reviews are further spread by social media services like Twitter and Facebook.
While the travel industry complains about fake reviews from competitors and disaffected customers, the majority of fake reviews are from hoteliers themselves pumping up their own business. It’s always interesting how many gushing reviews are from anonymous posters with only one or two reviews to their name.
Should any of the threatened court cases actually make it before a judge, there may be a few hoteliers finding themselves in an uncomfortable position, a classic case of being careful about what you wish for.
That’s not to say Tripadvisor doesn’t have a problem, the comments in a recent Telegraph story about the service show they have the web 2.0 problem of lousy customer support which comes from a low cost, user generated business model.
A more serious point which is overlooked by most of the critics is that Tripadvisor, like most travel sites, is linked to certain booking services. If you attempt to use the site to book a property that isn’t aligned with the site, it may well falsely report there are “no rooms available”, which is deceptive and will almost certainly fall foul of competition laws in most countries.
For users of sites, it means we have to be careful with what the reviews and the sites themselves tell us. So what should we watch for?
Spotting dodgy reviews
The obvious thing is the planted review. The easiest way to spot this is by the number of reviews submitted by the commenter.
If a commenter only has one or two reviews then it’s almost certain they either have an axe to grind or they have been submitted by the establishment or it’s staff as most rational people don’t have the energy or time to build a comprehensive profile of reviews just to shaft one place.
Another useful tactic is to look at the reviews around it, do others disagree with that reviewer or are they consistent? Outlier bad reviews can indicate a plant, a grudge or simply a bad day in the kitchen.
Dealing with bad reviews
As we’ve pointed out before, consistent bad reviews on these sites usually indicate a structural problem in the business however if you suspect a fake or planted review, most services have a “flag as inappropriate” option or a dispute mechanism.
Be careful using these however as flagging a legitimate complaint as malicious or fake may antagonise the poster and give the poor review more publicity than you would like.
The social aspects of the web, such as review sites and social media services like Twitter and Facebook, are going to become more important over the next few years as internet users use them to help sift through the massive amount of information on the net.
All businesses, whether in hospitality or other industries, need to take these sites and the reviews on them seriously.