Travel advice site is here to stay despite mixed reviews

ANALYSIS:DEPENDING ON what you read and who you believe, Voltaire, Franklin D Roosevelt or Spiderman's uncle Ben coined the phrase "with great power comes great responsibility". No matter who deserves the credit, it is a message TripAdvisor would do well to heed.

It used to be that people who had a good customer service experience in a hotel told one or two people, while those who had a bad one told 10. Today, the numbers that can be reached by either camp with a few key strokes is closer to 50 million.

The wildly popular opinion- based travel site can make or break hotels. Over the past 12 years TripAdvisor has turned “crowdsourcing” for opinions into an art form and is increasingly the first port of call for tens of millions of tourists trying to decide where to visit and where to stay.

TripAdvisor was successful from the start and in 2004, when it was just four years old, it was bought by travel giant Expedia for about €150 million. Late last year, following its much-anticipated initial public offering, it was deemed to be worth in excess of €3 billion by the New York Stock Exchange.

It is a phenomenon and one that is loved, hated and feared in equal measure by hoteliers. It is not hard to see why. Two weeks ago, the website ranked three small hotels in Kerry and Sligo in its top 25 hotels in the world for 2012. The owners were delighted and all three told The Irish Times that the recognition would lead to a significant bounce in business.

But TripAdvisor is a double- edged sword. Many hoteliers feel the reviews it carries from members of the travelling public are not adequately vetted. There is a widespread belief that many reviews, both good and bad, are faked either by hoteliers trying to improve their ranking or by their rivals trying to poach guests.

There are also negative reviews which might actually come from genuine guests but could still be considered to be disproportionate to their experience. "In tens of millions of reviews on websites like Amazon.com, Citysearch, TripAdvisor and Yelp, new books are better than Tolstoy, restaurants are undiscovered gems and hotels surpass the Ritz," the New York Times said last summer, emphasising the exaggeration.

Hoteliers who spoke to The Irish Timesyesterday acknowledged the benefits of the website but many expressed concern over its power, with some saying negative reviews posted anonymously did untold damage.

Reviews can remain on the site for years, even after a hotel has changed hands and been completely remodelled, which makes things doubly frustrating for a sector that is already struggling through the worst recession in the history of the State.

Last autumn concerns over the veracity of reviews led to a complaint being brought to the British Advertising Standards Authority by KwikChex, an online reputation management company representing more than 2,000 UK hotels. It took issue with the company’s slogan – “reviews you can trust” – as it said no review could actually be trusted because they were anonymous. There was also concern about hotels using positive reviews in promotional material because such praise was unverifiable.

The authority issued its findings today and the results are bad news for TripAdvisor. The authority said it must “not claim or imply that all the reviews that appeared on the website were from real travellers, or were honest, real or trusted”.

In response, TripAdvisor, said it was a “highly technical view around some marketing copy that was used in a limited capacity”.

The hoteliers umbrella group, for its part, said yesterday it had found “evidence of the ways in which the site is being abused by fraudsters, some of whom are malevolent and do great harm to reputable businesses”.

The row about reviews will rumble on but there is broad acceptance that TripAdvisor has changed the game – and changed it forever.