Golmer's Blog

One would think that traveler review sites like Tripadvisor.com, for example, there to look out for the interests of the traveler - i.e. a place where travel consumers can go to not only rate their experiences, but research valid reviews of other’s experiences in the location they are planning on staying so they can make informed decisions. 

On the face, that seems like a good idea - until you throw  tourism bureaus and counties trying to make money, greed, and dishonest property owners into the mix that are trying to squeeze every buck out of the traveling public that they can.

It is up to the individual traveler to decide whether or not they can believe the reviews they read, and the review sites, tourism bureaus, counties, along with owners and property managers, play a lot of smoke and mirrors games to make you think the place you are researching is top notch and that any “bad” reviews you read are just disgruntled or anomalous travelers with a grudge.

There are a different types of reviews. There are reviews written by property owners themselves, or written by companies paid to write/advertise the property. There are tourism bureau generated reviews. Then there are “customer” reviews. The reviews can be on the web site OF the property, or they can be on traveler review sites like Fodors.com or Tripadvisor.com.

Most of the other review sites list the company promotional “review” and then merely link to (primarily) reviews posted on Tripadvisor.com and a couple of others. It is kind of misleading when you are looking for reviews and google an establishment and get three pages of sites that have reviews for the place, only to find out that they all link back to Tripadvisor.com - i.e. even though you have three pages of “review sites” you are really looking at the same reviews from primarily ONE site. 

Of course company-sponsored “reviews” (which is what you see most when you google a property) are all positive, putting the establishment in the best possible light. They are really, after all, promotional advertisements, not real reviews.

When one does filter down to the “customer reviews” one is first presented the reviews in date order, newest first. Now while most sites have strict controls (at least on paper) to ensure that property owners don’t write reviews in the guise of customers, it isn’t a far stretch to think that this happens regularly. I reviewed one company last summer (a real dump in the outer banks) that had glowing reviews up front in date order that seemed to be legitimate. Of course the more you dig, the more you see all of the “positive” posts are really responses to older “negative” posts, that have the same “flavor,” grammatical errors, misspellings, praises for the owner, an almost invariably were written as a “1-off” review. 

Having stayed at the place I’m using as an example (based on a cursory review of the available review material, with out being really informed of the review site “game”), I can say first-hand that the negative reviews were “spot-on” and the positive ones were most probably owner-generated fluff to negate the influence of negative reviews. Can I prove it with 100% certainly? No. I could if I had the drive to get access to the review sites logs, but that takes a court order.

I wrote a review of the establishment (complete with evidentiary pictures, etc.) , but I quickly found out a few things after posting it - primarily that the owners have the ability to challenge any review and have it removed as “biased.” I also found that it is far easier for a property owner to challenge and have a review removed than it is for a reviewer to challenge the authenticity or veracity of obviously fraudulent “positive” reviews. I also found that, at least in my case, several “counter reviews” that directly reverence my review and piecemeal attempted to negate very point started immediately appearing to push my review down the list both in rating and importance. The review sites claim to not be complicit in the game, but it at least seemed to be true when an owner can have a negative review removed in a couple of hours but requests to remediate fraudulent positive reviews are either not responded to at all or responded to days or weeks later.

Add to the fact that the “positive” reviews violate the forum’s own rules - referencing other posts, denigrating posters, etc. and one can quickly see that there is at least some implied complicity. The forum admins respond - even when the specific post and rules violated are quoted to them (after a fashion) by saying they don’t have time to review the thousands of posts made daily, etc. 

You also have to join each review site to make reviews. They make it a pain for you to want to do so.

So I guess my point is that if you are going to use traveler review sites to make decisions on where you will stay during your travels, don’t just look AT the reviews, READ them and use the tools available on the site to separate the wheat from the chaff. A few suggestions:

-Pay attention to whether a review is written by an owner, an agency, a tourism bureau, or a traveler. Immediately discount all of them except for the latter - the rest are all actually advertisements, not reviews even though they look to be reviews on their face. Even if reviews are “customer” reviews, never take the content at face value - read them in conjunction with all the others to see if they have a lot in common with other posts for the site.

-Reviews are most likely all serviced by one site or at most a couple of sites. Most of those point to Tripadvisor.com - there are a couple of other reasonable sources like Fodors.com, but they don’t get or aggregate as many reviews as Tripadvisor does. Actually click through to the customer reviews to make sure where you are and that you are not looking at the same reviews over and over.

-Reviews are presented in newest-first date order, with an aggregator at the TOP of the page - just because the aggregator says a site is four or five out of five stars only means there are more positive reviews on the site, not that they are accurate. Since the default is newest-first order, dishonest owners will load the review page with positive reviews to push the negative reviews off of the front page, so all you see at first glance is really good reviews and a great review aggregator at the top.

-Change the sort order of the list to show ratings from worst (at the top) to best (at the bottom). Actually READ the reviews for substantive content and to see if they look like they are independent honest reviews. If the negative ones look independent and honest, but the positive ones all have the same writer’s flavor and tone, stay away from the site.

-Research the property owner through the Better Business Bureau. If they are not even listed with the area BBB that is a Big Red Flag!! Also check the area Chamber of Commerce and the local tourism bureau. You can also google the property and the word “bankruptcy” to see if they have financial problems, or if the property has changed owners lately or repeatedly.

-Read the property’s stated refund policies. The place we had the misfortune to stay charges your card for the full amount of your stay at the time you make the reservation (not just reserving or checking to make sure you can pay) and pretty much had a policy making it impossible to GET a refund for any reason short of police and credit card company intervention. 

-Pay attention to the date of reviews. If all of the good reviews are old and the new reviews are all bad, stay away.

-Call the local police or sheriff’s department and simply ask them about the property. Our trip to the OBX resulted in a police escort back to the establishment (the owner called them) - but the sheriff actually HELPED US get our money back from a dishonest proprietor. After our interaction with the owner, the sheriff told us out in the parking lot that no local would ever stay in the place (even during a hurricane evacuation), and that if he didn’t bring me back to confront the owner I’d have never gotten my money back.

The review site is NOT going to look out for your best interest. Only YOU can do that.