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Trip Advisor - Sort Yourself Out Once and For All!
Recently there was a link posted on facebook by Balmashanner B&B, regarding a story of a couple who posted a fake review on Trip Advisor, because of a disagreement with the hotel
I commented that these people should be prosecuted and another comment was posted saying, 'how?'. Well quite simply they should be done for defamation of the hotel's character. Although I happen to really like Trip Advisor and wholeheartedly agree with it's 'wisdom of the masses' philosophy, it's time the company grew up and took its responsibilities more seriously.
A review like the one mentioned could be very damaging for the hotel and even if it had 10 good reviews, this one was so bad it would have certainly put me off the place. I'm sure many read it and been put off, which has lost the hotel money.
The blame has to lie with Trip Advisor for not having a good enough system to monitor reviews. This review was done 10 months after the stay, which certainly shouldn't be allowed.
It seems as if while Trip Advisor, along with many other review sites are happy to profit from the sites' popularity through advertising, they fail to ensure companies, who pay their wages (indirectly) are being given a fair account.
What's infuriating is that a company the size of TA could, without a hurculean effort, deal with the problem.
Why don't Trip Advisor give each hotel a list of codes to give to their guests, which they must use to log in before posting a review. The code is unique to the hotel, so proves that the guest has definitely stayed there. The codes are time-sensitive and must be used within two weeks of the stay or they will not be able to be used.
Though the hoteliers wouldn't know which guests wrote the review, Trip advisor would be able to find out their email address and the time they stayed at the hotel. The very fact that they are entering a code would certainly make people think twice about what they are writing.
25 comments
TA has been writing nonsense back to enquiries about fixing this. If you want a dozy of a runaround so far, ask @BrewsterInn
Trip Advisor also need to back up. It seems they had a problem at the beginning of August when one of my reviews vanished ( have since discovered that other business had same happen). Trip Advisor responded through forum indicating reviewer must had taken off review but when I contacted lady who did review she was surprised and unaware of any problems. The lady said she would do another review for me if necessary but felt that Trip Advisor could surely reinstate the original one. To date they haven't been forthcoming with any solution. What is the point of us trying to encourage guests to use Trip Advisor if when they do take the trouble to review it then vanishes? I am a rather dissolusioned with TA at the moment
Result a bad review on TA we reported what happened but they just didn't care
TAs answer to this will be that it's about 'wisdom of the masses' and one needs to read all of the reviews before making a decision, so if there is 20, then read them all and hopefully they won't all be done by the hotelier!
regards,
Nawar Alsaadi
GHr Founder
http://www.elliott.org/blog/we-are-not-crooks/
Regards,
Nawar
Thanks to you, and everyone who has commented, for your input on TripAdvisor policies. We rely on feedback from the hospitality community as much as from our travelers. We try to provide a balanced process that allows travelers to help each other plan the perfect trip while at the same time giving property owners the opportunity to comment on their customers’ reviews.
This summer we responded to Owner feedback by shortening the timeframe for comment from travelers to 12 months. We hope this will improve the users’ experience by offering the freshest content possible on our site, while understanding that it can be challenging for travelers to write reviews on a tight schedule.
Clearly it is in everyone’s best interests that we ensure the integrity of reviews and so we have three primary methods of doing this. Reviews are systematically screened by proprietary site tools and anything suspicious is flagged; a team of quality assurance specialists investigate the suspicious ones; and our large and passionate community helps report issues. Those with truly ill-intentions are always going to look for ways to subvert the system, even if they are asked to enter a code to verify their stay. That’s why we are continuously upgrading our systems to detect reviews that don’t meet our guidelines.
If an owner disagrees with a review or wants to share their view of what happened, we strongly encourage them to write a management response through our owners’ center (http://www.tripadvisor.com/Owners). This is their chance to address concerns that were raised and clarify any misunderstandings. Management responses appear on TripAdvisor in conjunction with the original review, so they’re visible to all prospective guests. We often hear from travelers that how a property responds to criticism has more impact on their booking decision that the negative review itself.
And we do believe that travelers value the wisdom of the crowds. In order to help them surface the most prevalent opinions, we’re adding a review summarization feature in the next few months. It will highlight the comments and terms most frequently used in reviews to describe a property, and help bring that wisdom of the masses to the forefront.
This year we launched a new division, TripAdvisor for Business, expressly to focus on the services we offer our trade colleagues because we recognize the need to enhance them. We are working on a large number of developments that we will announce over the coming months designed for this purpose and we look forward to receiving your feedback on them, as well.
Thanks,
April Robb
TripAdvisor
I have heard so many complaints anout TA. It was great reading the article and the comments as what we (at eezeer.com) do is to create a tranceparent platform with certified reviews. Our site uses GPS and geolocation technology from smart phones to link a review to a property. So you actually have to be inside a hotel to have your review certified. However this is not enough for us, once a review has been submitted we still have our moderation team fine comb the review to check for false or fake reviews and we encourage the properties how are members to communicate with us and the other members if they find a review to be fake.
Great job
PS. better luck next time in our iPod competition ;)
How would I improve TripAdvisor. (not in any order of importance)
1.) The website is funded by lots of adverts and annoying pop ups and to a lesser extent by the new business listings. I would definitely get rid of Pop ups.
2.) Reviews go missing but generally guests are unaware of this and unaware of the efforts to minimise fraudulent reviews. The system need to be more transparent . Assuming there are not a huge number of fraudulent reviews why not show a fragment of a fraudulent review and flag it as 'fraudulent because ....... '? This would discourage further attempts and identify to guests why their reviews got pulled i.e. because they did not click on the verification email.
3.) Review the policy of only listing a property within the village it is physically located. Not everyone who wants to visit a Town/City, wants to stay in it, nor do they know every tiny village around the area. The map function on TripAdvisor is a bit buried and not everyone can navigate GoogleMaps easily. Get in line with everyone else, including 'Visit Britain', and allow guests to search for accommodation within a radius around a destination and let them decide if they want a city centre break or a rural rest. There might be a bigger uptake on your business listings if you had this.
4.) Remember there are places outside of the USA. We all know the USA is a big country, only 27 people there have got a passport and they all think Afganistan is in Europe, but don't perpetuate that myth by listing every tiny town in USA before the cities with the same name. Lincoln, England (population 89,228) is a good example, when you search for 'Lincoln' it is listed well below Lincoln New Hampshire (population 1349), Lincoln Iowa (population 156).
There's a lot that's good about Trip Advisor, but equally it is flawed in a number of ways. Top of my list in that respect is the time allowed for travellers to post reviews. 12 months is a nonsense. Anything written more than a month after the event is irrelevent and is likely to be inaccurate at best. I review hotels for a living and I know how quickly things can change, so allowing even well-intentioned guests to write about their experiences so long after the event is pointless, misleading and potentially damaging.
We would also be interested if there was a way that TA could make it easier for guests to leave reviews. We have a far higher % of reviews per guests who have booked with eviivo - yet our service is the same for everyone. We can only assume that other guests are put off by the TA registration proces and find eviivo easier to use. And of course, guests can be confident that eviivo reviews are genuine and written by 'real' guests.
He said he had this happen last month and called the guest to say they (as per their booking terms) would be charged the first night’s charge. The guest simply said “do that and I will put a scathing review on TripAdvisor”. He said the the damage of that review would cost far more than the loss of income!
