We know how powerful sites like TripAdvisor, Yelp, and others have become when it comes to consumer reviews of hotels, restaurants, etc.
Given how much the web has changed though, isn’t it about time businesses started taking back their customer reviews?
The question is not that easy to answer because there are a number of factors that affect the efficacy of reviews and their influence on consumers.
Do you remember those comment cards that were placed in your hotel room or on your restaurant table that asked you in earnest: “How was your experience?”.
How often did you fill those comment cards out and, if you did fill one out, did you ever expect to get a response from anyone.
Probably not, because you expected that this was a one-way communication process. You left your comment and it was up to the establishment to take action or not.
Regardless of whether your comment was good or bad, no one ever saw the comment except for the establishment. Â In essence, you had to trust that the company was going to do something (anything!) with your feedback instead of filing it in the old circular filing cabinet.
Trust is a powerful thing and demands a level of accountability and transparency that just didn’t exist with paper comment cards.
There was no visibility into the process of reviewing the comment cards and certainly no indication that a suggestion would be taken seriously. Â Now, however, with review sites, customers can voice their concerns for everyone to see.
Now it’s up to the company to watch and listen for comments in order to stay on top of their reputation. Â Instead of filling out a comment card, happy and disgruntled guests are going to sites like TripAdvisor and leaving their comments.
But, is what they are writing different then what they would write on a comment card?
No system is infallible and both corporate and consumer trust of sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor is being questioned. Â Recent moves by the advertising regulator in the UK and the countless complaints from hotels are an indication that, although TripAdvisor is clearly a benefit to consumers, many businesses don’t like the idea of having to compete with their own brand.
Just how impartial are customer reviews anyway? Â When you have a site as large and powerful as TripAdvisor (in terms of search engine optimization) there are going to be those that try to game the system.
You don’t have to search very hard to find all kinds of complaints about fake reviews, libellous comments, and a lack of support for businesses.
I think that most of the reviews on sites like TripAdvisor and Yelp are genuine. However, if the individual companies had better mechanisms for handling, processing, and posting their own reviews, then their customers would be less likely to turn to sites like Yelp or TripAdvisor.
Recent experience tells me, however, that hotels (for one) are still ill-prepared to handle customer feedback. After a recent trip I received a customer feedback survey that was over twenty questions long.
I have no idea how long it would have take to complete the questionnaire because answering ten questions was already seven questions too many.
Think about it though, if you stayed at a hotel and they asked you to write an honest review about your stay that would be posted without alteration on a publicly viewable review section of their site, would you do it?
Many reservation systems now capture an email address, so it shouldn’t be hard to send a follow-up email to the customer asking for feedback. I know I would take the time to complete a review if I trusted that the company was going to take my review seriously.
If the claims are true and over 70% of the reviews out there are positive, it seems to me that those reviews should be provided directly to the companies being reviewed rather than through review sites.
But do consumers trust reviews from travelers that are posted on a supplier website? Again, the question is whether or not the traveler can trust the source and the process for gathering the review.
Experience would indicate that verifying reviews or associating the authenticity of the review is key to trusting the validity of the comments left by the reviewer.
For example, if a customer was to sign-in with Facebook or identify the review with a specific itinerary number or reservation number, then the company and the viewing public would know that the review was written by a genuine guest.
Organizations like the Adventure Travel Trade Association (ATTA) are already investigating the possibility of creating a standard review structure that would allow companies to act as gateways to a larger distributed review store.
Hotels, unlike adventure operators, handle hundreds of customers a day so the available guest user base for reviews is quite high. Â With systems like TripAdvisor and Yelp, the benefit is in the sheer number of reviews and looking at the average.
If there are fake or inaccurate reviews in the system, they have very little impact overall. Â For a small operator who only handles a few hundred customers a year however, every review is important and will have an effect on the overall rating.
Assuming that operators stick with a standard structure, review content could be distributed along with standard tour content in order to help with conversion. By using a standard review structure, it is conceivable that reviews created on a related (or unrelated) website about an operator could be shared with the operator for use on their website in the same format.
Before all the SEO naysayers start going on about duplicate content, just think about it rather more objectively.
TripAdvisor does not care who books what, or links to what, on their site. Â On any given attraction or hotel page you’ll find advertising for operators who are direct competitors to the one for whom you are reading reviews.
Why would an operator who has spent time building their brand send a customer off to TripAdvisor to read reviews only to end up losing them to a competitors link? Â TripAdvisor needs the review content in order to maintain rank and drive eyeballs and clicks to paid advertising, so for them the duplicate content issue is very real.
A small operator uses reviews to help convert a visitor into a paid customer not necessarily to drive them to the site in the first place. Â The full content of the review can be used on the site without the need to link off to a third party.
I mentioned earlier that verified reviews are critical for credibility. Â I think that organizations such as ATTA and perhaps even tourism associations, have a possible role to play in setting a code of ethics around the use of reviews and for driving some adoption of a review standard.
Adding some industry validation and perhaps even oversight to the review gathering process could go a long way to ensuring the reliability of reviews.
Would standardizing the review structure and giving suppliers the ability to gather and distribute their own reviews have a long term negative impact on sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor? Â I don’t think so.
I think, if anything, it would present these companies with an opportunity to aggregate data from a myriad additional sources without the need to duplicate effort. Â Imagine, if you will, TripAdvisor reviews displayed along side ATTA verified reviews gathered by the supplier.
I certainly think operators would welcome the opportunity to harness their own reviews in a more open way, but will the large brands go for it? Â Ask me again in a year.
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About Stephen Joyce
Great read! You raise so many points here that we, eezeer, feel very strongly about.
You say here “I think that most of the reviews on sites like TripAdvisor and Yelp are genuine.”
We don’t feel that “most” is good enough. Even if the statistic is as high as 70%. It means we are being mislead about 1 in every 3 reviews!
Really like how you continue ” However, if the individual companies had better mechanisms for handling, processing, and posting their own reviews that their customers would be less likely to turn to sites like Yelp or TripAdvisor.” We are trying to simplify exactly this process for brands on the eezeer.com platform.
This is another interesting point “if you stayed at a hotel and they asked you to write an honest review about your stay that would be posted without alteration on a publicly viewable review section of their site, would you do it?” I believe that 90% of reviews will not be too different when in the public eye. It might encourage more reviews and more honest ones too. Since currently only extremes review (Really happy or really upset visitors)
Thanks for the thought provoking post
At eezeer, our main concern is “fake reviews”.
This is why we rely only on certified geolocated reviews.
This is also why we invite hospitality professionals to register their brand on eezeer (free) so that they can keep track of what’s being said about them so they can be in total control of their brand’s online reputation.
We understand that people don’t have hours to spend on reviews and as such our review app is quick and easy to use with only 5 questions about your overall stay. Keeping it quick and to the point!
Working for a DMO, I can tell you that it’s a subject that most “in-charge” avoid for political reasons. Authenticity for most DMOs involves acting and talking like a brochure – there is no room for the truth that user-reviews might bring.
Great point.
DMOs need to understand that the consumer is no longer interested in what the marketing organization says (is great) about their city, region or country.
Consumers don’t trust DMOs because DMOs don’t provide trust.
- Troy
Troy, do you have any research to support your “Consumers don’t trust DMOs because DMOs don’t provide trust” comment? It’s a very strong broad-brush statement to make, in any case.
Blain
That’s a pity and a lost opportunity in my opinion. I think authenticity is about transparency. Why would a DMO promote a property or activity of an operator who isn’t providing a great experience? The reviews could be a powerful feedback mechanism for DMOs. TourismBC did something similar with their user generated content strategy a few years ago and it worked quite well. So we know it can be done.
Exactly Stephen, exactly.
I have literally had this conversation with past employers and clients:
DMO: We are not sure about reviews. What if a negative one comes up for a member?
Troy: Well, the member should be monitoring their business, but we can alert them so they can handle it.
DMO: Yes, but what if a hotel already has a lot of bad reviews?
Troy: Then you should revoke their membership. Why would you promote a bad tourism experience?
DMO: Well, they pay for membership.
Troy: Oy.
- Troy
This is why we chose to include the TripAdvisor widget in our stakeholder profiles a few years ago. I looked at having our own review system but I didn’t want to be the middle man between stakeholders and disgruntled visitors. Using TA on our site allows us to offer a recognized third-party to play this role.
Blain
I’m not suggesting that the DMO be responsible for collecting the reviews. I’m suggesting that they can play a part in ensuring that the reviews collected by stakeholders abide by a certain code of ethics or code of conduct. So, if a stakeholder chooses to accept and manage their own bookings, that they do so according to a standard practice.
What Troy describes here, is pretty much a widespread DMO reality. Sadly, really, as nobody is served in the long run by putting “member’s interest” over that of the customer. It’s time that this structure is reviewed by those who still have it, or at least make it absolutely clear that being a member does not mean automatic support by the DMO if performance is actually detrimental to the destination image.
The DMO should be the overall brand steward for the destination and have the support by everyone to play that role effectively. Customer reviews are a great quality control tool in this area of DMO responsibility.
The least a DMO can do is integrate the TA widget on their site and provide potential visitors a certain level of transparency.
TripAdvisor reviews tend to have a heavy negative bias in my experience, another reason for properties not to link to reviews there. This is almost certainly self-selection bias, where guests who have had particularly bad experiences are more likely to share their thoughts than those having positive experiences.
Travellers still find them valuable enough for me to use them on my own site, but it would be nice for TA to address this problem.
Hey James,
A common perspective, but one that is not necessarily true…although, I do agree that most consumers expect a greater amount of negative reviews.
Anyway, related: http://www.tnooz.com/2011/07/15/news/over-90-million-travel-reviews-tested-60-percent-found-to-be-positive/
Review breakdown:
Positive – 60%
Neutral – 28%
Negative – 12%
Of course, the impact of a single, strong negative review v. 5 or 10 positive reviews is likely greater in the mind of the consumer.
- Troy
I think that may be partly due to management not providing satisfactory channels for resolving negative experiences in the first place. If the guest trusts that the organization will do their best to acknowledge and try and remedy their particular issue, they would be less likely to write a review elsewhere.
Great topic! Reviewing places is part of my profession as a travel writer. I have to say that I do often look at TripAdvisor reviews–especially if I’m looking for places to eat and recommendations for something specific to order. Some sort of standards would be great for lodging in particular. I blow right past the falsely gushy reviews or the I’ll-never-be-happy ones and seek the thoughtful middle ground. You can’t have apples to apples comparisons when it comes to tremendously diverse accommodations (and budgets), but there should be ways reviewers can help readers better cull out the uniqueness of a place–is it an extra level of service, evening cookies, a bowl of fresh fruit, the price, stellar travel assistance, super-soft sheets, scenic location, etc.? I do like how TripAdvisor has categories such as romance, family travel, business, travel, etc. Hopefully the massive body of reviews and info online will begin to streamline and improve as people expect (and demand) better online content.
Lake of support? Where is that?
Ha ha, thanks for that. I believe it’s just south of the land of the lost
Blaine, Blaine, Blaine,
Wake up and smell the coffee.
I assume that the marketing dollars that you invested through your e-Commerce department is all in vain because you decided that a hotel review on TA was more important that allowing the customer to book direct with you.
Blaine, FYI your direct channel conversion cost is less than $13. Your OTA cost is 10% of the booking plus merchant.
Another perfect example of why some hoteliers are two-years behind the curve.
Tom Costello
CEO
Groups International
Stephen, eloquent as always, thank you! And yes, why the hell shouldn’t a brand offer an outlet for reviews? Tools are certainly available and its proven that people will leave reviews! I say go for it.
I guess where I have my slight doubts is:
1) To me, a brand boasting its own reviews removes the 3rd party, “unbiased” aspect for me. If all the shiny reviews somehow rise to the top (naturally or not) I will be skeptical of some curation.
2) Community. TA & Yelp offer me a community. I don’t want to go to each brand/hotel in Los Angeles to look at reviews of 5 stars. I just want to see reviews for 5 star hotels from people who claim to have stayed (and also claim to have kids, a dog etc.).
3) Using Facebook auth as a means of verifying “genuine” does not fill me with confidence. How many fake accounts are out there?
Despite my doubts, I’d probably still leave my reviews for the brand.
Thanks again, Greg
Thanks Greg, those are all valid concerns and ones that I think would be important to any consumer. That’s why I think there is room for a third-party to act as a trusted authority to ensure the reviews meet certain standards. Heck even TripAdvisor or Yelp could offer that service, but I doubt they would since it would diminish the need to go direct to their site. But having the ability to solicit verified trusted reviews on a brands own site and then use those reviews to help future conversions would most certainly have a positive impact on the brand.
Lots of food for thought here. I used to run Priceline’s international business, and the quality and quantity of reviews we collected were a huge asset, plus the OTAs in general also have the great advantage that they know that the consumer actually booked the property.
A couple of comments that may be relevant:
- if you proactively approach the customer and ask for comments, you get a very different profile of reviews. The passive approach attracts the annoyed and the delighted. Data from my current company (reevoo), which displays 600,000,000 pieces of social content (reviews and conversations) per month, shows that you get a significantly higher average score if you seek feedback, rather than wait for it. ie: it’s strongly in a brand’s interest to embrace this.
- secondly, more content tends to equal more trust. Conversion rates gradually increase with more review content. Perhaps surprisingly this continues even when you pass 100 reviews or more. By actively seeking content (a decently designed email questionnaire for example), you’ll get 100x more reviews than simply waiting for an annoyed customer write feedback on a webform somewhere. Additional content helps people find reviews from people like them.
- thirdly, review content is much more influential when the customer is confident of it’s authenticity. We design review collection systems, make pretty stringent efforts to ensure that they’re not being abused or bad reviews suppressed, and then stamp the content as an impartial third party (for people like Tesco, Bestbuy, Sony, Dixons etc) as a mark of authenticity. Again, this significantly helps impartiality and hence, conversion. We also help with the distribution of content as discussed in the article.
All the data referred to comes from outside travel, but I can see no reason why it wouldn’t apply.
Thanks again for the article, Andy
Great post that raises some excellent points.
I have no problems with private tourism businesses or groups collecting guest feedback specific to their business operations, however I have difficulty accepting that any taxpayer/member funded tourism trade organisations, DMOs etc should be delivering review systems on behalf of their beneficiaries.
There seems to be a natural knee-jerk reaction to regulate, control and reinvent the wheel to overcome perceived problems of open systems – this often leads to unintended consequences including costs imposed upon businesses.
I am comfortable with tourism trade associations that may wish to set some review standard guidelines in order to generate positive change or debate, however resourcing an in-house duplicated and inward looking guest review system to be aggregated into existing platforms may not deliver the benefits as intended.
I accept that Tripadvisor has issues of creditability within the travel industry that regularly point out irregularities with the identity of the reviewers, the authenticity of reviews and the opportunity for reviewers to post reviews without first experiencing what they are reviewing. I also accept that there is room for improvement.
If we believe PhoCusWright study commissioned by TripAdvisor, 98% of respondents find TripAdvisor hotel reviews to be accurate of the actual experience. While not being an apologist for TripAdvisor the open source platform that they have developed has allowed millions of travellers to make no-suprise travel decisions.
While the travel industry seems to have issues with TripAdvisor, the travelling public seem to be able to be more than willing participants and are able to accurately decipher the published review information.
Good points. I disagree with your statement that TripAdvisor is an open source platform. If it were then brands would be able to freely use the review content without having to link back to TripAdvisor’s website or pay licensing fees. TripAdvisor’s review content is its bread and butter so it doesn’t give access away for free.
My point is that if we had a standard for how reviews are collected, then we could see an open source platform for reviews, one that allows brands to freely use the content for their benefit regardless of where the review is collected. What I envision is a distributed review model, where the reviews collected on many different sites about the same property could be shared and reused across all the sites. In this way, every site benefits from the collective efforts of all the review sites aggregating reviews.
I am not suggesting that we need DMOs to provide platforms, I am suggesting that they have a role to play in setting the standards by which the platforms operate.
Excellent points made by most everyone, but there are some tricky realities all must face:
1) TripAdvisor would be a great site if everyone played by the rules. Unfortunately, following the pattern of SEO, big money is at stake for top ratings – that provides considerable incentive for some to bend, break or ignore the rules. TripAdvisor remains a very useful site, but will become gradually less useful as review spam and Fake Review Optimization (FRO) increases.
2) TripAdvisor’s solution for users to use an Olympic scoring system (throwing out the top and bottom scores and averaging the rest) may be acceptable now, but as FRO specialists become more proficient, that won’t work either. Practitioners are already astroturfing positive reviews to mitigate the impact of negative reviews.
Unlike Google, who can continuously update its search algorithm to combat web spam, TripAdvisor does not (and can not) have perfect information regarding the content of its user-generated reviews. The business structure and financial model are stacked against it. When facing an organization armed with thousands of IP addresses and web-mail accounts, there is little TripAdvisor can do to identify seemingly valid profiles that have dozens of reviews spread over multiple years as fictitious.
TripAdvisor seems destined to catch only those who are careless, overly aggressive or unsophisticated. It’s a lot like fighting the drug war. The bad guys are often better armed and better funded than the armies hunting them…
3) Reviews are more honest when they are anonymous. Independent of the first point (which enables anonymous reviews to be more dishonest as well), the research I’ve seen indicates that when identities are revealed, reviewers have a tendency to produce higher scores and to be more gentle in their critiques. This doesn’t help anyone as the ultimate goal is accuracy.
4) Google is structurally fighting the war against illegitimate reviews in Google+ by mandating that individuals use their real names on profiles. Facebook has a similar approach of requiring profiles to be humans, with Pages relegated the task of handling companies. groups and concepts. Apple, too integrates the user profile with its platform and has plans to leverage this capability extensively in travel by allowing individuals to use their phones to validate their identity when traveling.
TripAdvisor took a step forward when it unified its e-mail addresses with its members’ Facebook e-mail addresses last year, but that only covers a sub-set of its users and TripAdvisor does not have access to the deep content within Facebook to independently validate an identity.
5) The closer a review gets to any brand (hotel, chain, DMO, etc.) the less it is trusted. Even if a brand claims to present unfiltered reviews, the consumer will be skeptical as that level of transparency is not the accepted norm.
6) Reviews and ratings are powerful weapons that can wield considerable damage if they fall into the wrong hands. Brands will be hesitant (and rightly so) to allow reviews that could be used against them by competitors to flow freely into the public domain.
7) Review sites must become more semantic and apply itinerary-related context to better match the reviews with the needs & interests of the traveler. As more reviews are captured over time, there is a dramatic need to thin the herd. There will be greater demand for a curated synopsis and representative reviews that are relevant to the traveler.
The concept of deleting reviews over a year old is not viable as it negates the benefit of demonstrating reliable quality over the long term and makes it easier for FRO’s to game the system.
8 ) Standards are fantastic to facilitate the sharing of information and benefit the industry. However, with walled gardens, patent bidding wars and acquisitions being utilized to capture market share and create barriers to entry, many organizations in leadership roles may be hesitant to cede full control of a perceived competitive advantage to a third party. This is especially true if a standard could help competitors gain traction. I say this as an outspoken proponent of travel industry standards and a former member of the first OpenTravel Alliance Interoperability Committee.
I see the ultimate endgame producing something like this: An open/standardized and distributed review platform with a mechanism to validate identities, but provide user-based controls to maintain their anonymity.
Finally, I have a simple poll running on my blog: “What Sources are Most Trusted for Hotel Reviews and Ratings?” You can find it here: http://j.mp/qxWq3P
Please take a minute to answer the survey honestly and share the link with your friends and colleagues.
Since the distribution is my social graph, most people replying are experienced travelers and travel industry cognoscenti – The results thus far are extremely interesting and not exactly what I would have expected.
I will reserve my final judgement on the topic until after I see the final results, but I am already fairly certain that travelers seek three things when evaluating the veracity of hotel reviews.
Bravo Mr Cole.
Tip of the hat to your thoughtful and pragmatic analysis… as always.
I’m surprised no one so far has mentioned reviews on hotel booking sites as being a decent compromise.
Venere was probably the first to launch years ago with reviews at the core value add, but since then everyone does it.
Reviews on booking sites can be 1. fresh, 2. trustable (only who has really been there can review), and 3. somewhat contextual (I was there for business, with family, with friends etc). And they can also be anonymized in public, yet certified by the site as being authentic.
In my opinion hoteliers should focus on getting their customers write reviews on the site where the customer booked from, not on TA.
Many of my clients are using post stay on line guest surveys very effectively and these can be comp0lied and measured against key quality control standards they have set for their target customer mix, which is very important, as often a customer in the ‘wrong’ demographic segment for a particular property i.e. not a target customer, will be unreliable from a review standpoint, that’s just a fact of life.
On the Trip Advisor front, you get ad hoc reviews, not judged against specific standards for benchmarking, and with zero demographics, so as far as I am concerned that is another source of unreliability
We can talk about TA till the cows come hoe, lets focus on proof of pudding and await the observations of ASA, us human mortals will not be able to influence this going forward, so all the above are a good read but will have no practical effect or influence, its all pure speculation at this stage.
Big brands have their own issues with regards this but also the resources to do something about it. Small business owners do not really have that much choice. Do not go on TA and you are missing a great revenue channel ( all be it one with many flaws as discussed)
Doing a internal review system on our own sites is great but it will only be seen by those visiting our own sites and will also be less likely to be trusted.
The travel industry can be very inward looking. Customers want somewhere to post reviews they do not really care about all our issues. To date TA has the space and I see no other option but to play their game at present.
After much consideration I took the view to have all my customer feedback out in the open. Yes this will cause us issues at times and has down but it does encourage us to try and give out best all the time.
About 4 months back we then decided to start getting proactive rather than just seeing what happened on all review sites so we started sending the below It looks better with graphic etc on what they get but the below will give you an idea. It is an open and honest request to tell us what they think of us.
It is happening so no point in not trying to work with it.