With all the issues brewing around malicious reviews and ownership of review data, one online review site is trying another method.
TripReviews does this, it claims, by allowing businesses to display and post reviews on their own site and allowing users to better control their reviews.
The service, a relative newcomer to the review space, has been dutifully aggregating both reviews and ratings (reviews without content) since 2007.
The site has aggregated over 400,000 ratings and 6,000 reviews and has taken a different approach from the larger review sites by promoting its widget which allows reviewers to post reviews on a hotel, travel agent’s or tour operators own website, syndicating full reviews through RSS, and even plugging into TripReviews full content XML API.
TripReviews CEO and Founder Sean Rollinson says:
“The reason for TripReviews is simple, to give businesses a review platform that encourages their customers to share their experiences. TripReviews is also geared towards helping promote the supplier’s own business. There’s no ads for competitors on the review pages.”
The TripReviews platform was originally developed so that travel agents and tour operators could invite their customers to write reviews of their recent vacations and share them on their own websites.
Rollinson’s other business, Escapes.ca, for example, has been using the TripReviews widget and XML API for hotel and destination reviews for over two years and has solicited hundreds of reviews from customers in that time.
Although the site lacks a lot of the bells and whistles of sites like TripAdvisor and Yelp, the approach is also fundamentally different.
TripReviews is not a destination site, in other words – it is not meant to be the place where a traveler goes to compare a variety of services or browse for hotels, but rather a place to go to find reviews about a specific destination, hotel or attraction.
This distributed approach to review aggregation and the focus on the business being reviewed is one reason why it has remained relatively low key.
Registered reviewers who have written a review in haste and, a few weeks later, are feeling reviewer’s remorse, have the ability to delete their reviews at anytime, a simple feature that seems to be unavailable on most other review websites.
In addition to this feature, visitors have the ability to rate the usefulness of a review, post their own comments on the review, contribute to summaries and contact information, and to view and contact the original reviewer.
According to Rollinson, TripReviews has only removed a handful of reviews from the site primarily due to duplication or questionable content.
“If a hotel or attraction disputes the authenticity of a review, they can write a comment directly on the review or contact the registered user directly.
“If a review is anonymous, then we have the right to delete the review at anytime. Our belief is that if a reviewer is not going to take responsibility for their review and be accountable for its content, then we have no obligation to give them a voice on the site or protect their opinion.”
Although this seems like a hard line to take with anonymous reviews, it hasn’t been a huge issue since most of the reviews are a direct result of an invitation to review from the travel agent, operator, or hotel.
Rollinson adds:
“Most of the reviews through our Escapes.ca site for example have been derived using the ‘Invite a Friend’ feature which we use to schedule and send out review invitations to customers. The scheduled invitation is a great way to engage with customers after their trip and also ensures the review is authentic.”
This proactive approach to writing reviews seems to result in fewer negative reviews being posted to the system in general and helps build the properties reputation and brand. Will this open business driven approach reduce fake or malicious reviews, it is hard to say.
Given that businesses are more engaged with the system by posting the reviews on their own websites, they may be much quicker to respond and address reviews as they are posted.
NB: Disclosure – Tnooz Node Stephen Joyce‘s company Sentias Software Corp developed TripReviews in partnership with Escapes.ca.
I’m quite fond of this approach in general. I’m a bit surprised they’ve only had “hundreds of reviews” in over two years though. Seems disappointing.
I asked Sean about this. He mentioned that these are reviews that are generated directly from his site (escapes.ca) rather than just reviews posted on tripreviews.com itself.
I like the idea a lot to give businesses an opportunity to respond. It helps the consumer in the end to make educated decisions on whether to stay at a property or not.
As an added note. I received some interesting stats from TripReviews. 47.5% of reviews are submitted by registered users, 52.5% by anonymous users. 88% are 3/5 or higher (positive) vs. only 12% 2.5/5 or less (negative).
I highly doubt tripreviews.com gets many more to add to those several hundred from escapes.ca. Looking at the front page, there appears to be a review every few days, which would indeed add up to a few hundred over 2 years. Obviously it needs a lot of growth at this point to be viable. But it is an interesting product nonetheless
The percentage of positive reviews is a bit of a problem with this system in my opinion. If reviews are usually by invitation, then I’m not really surprised that this is happening. A tour guide might only decide to send the invite to people they think liked it after all. And since the main source of negative reviews is anonymous passers-by (seeking out places to leave bad reviews), this also means a lot of those will have been removed.
The risk is that this just becomes a typical glowing “testimonials” page with nothing but happy talk from prepped carefully selected customers. Serves the company well enough, but it’s not so great for the consumers.
Thanks for the feedback Peter. You’re right, we need a lot of growth, which is why we think the best approach is to let businesses use the widget to gather reviews from their customers. It is a bit self-serving for the business, but at the same time, the business cannot control what a customer says and THEY can’t delete a review (only we or the reviewer can).
We’re not promoting it as a testimonial service but rather relatively self contain feedback/review service. There is nothing to stop a customer going to the site independent of an invitation and leaving a review.
If it gets businesses to start feeling better about asking for feedback and reviews (online) for their own services then I think it’s a good thing.
I checked this site for reviews of my business, I found 3 anonymous reviews
The first dated 3 years before we opened… (negative)
The second dated 2 years before we opened..(positive)
The third two months after we opened. (negative)
All of them 7-4 years old.
If this is typical then the review section needs all the PR it can pump up, as it is in my case and therefore, probably many others, worse than useless.
Sean, 7 days I emailed the contacts area on your site and received an auto reply saying that someone would be in contact, (about removing these reviews given years before the hotel opened), but have received no reply as yet
I see you have posted here so am hoping you will see my message here and can help.