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Concern has been expressed by travel industry insiders that TripAdvisor and similar sites, which rely on anonymous reviews, are beginning to wield too much power.
According to the Independent newspaper in the United Kingdom the concern has existed before, but Trip Advisor's Dirtiest Hotels list made it an even hotter topic in the past week.
Bob Cotton, CEO of the British Hospitality Association, told the Independent that hotels across Europe are lobbying the EU Commission to redo the rules that control website reviews.
The Trip Advisor website is advertised as being unbiased, but is this really true? For every negative review how many good reviews? Also, are the reviews written by genuine guests, or rival companies?
"Websites have a responsibility that the person has actually stayed at the hotel or dined at the restaurant,"
At Seachange Lodge, on the tropical island of Vanuatu, in the South Pacific, there was a complaint made by a disgruntled guest who felt he had been penalized, through his children’s behaviour. He was quick to write to Trip Advisor saying that children were not welcome at Seachange Lodge and advised anyone with young children to steer clear. He also filed a complaint with the Vanuatu Tourism Office.
Another family, however, was happily staying at Seachange Lodge at exactly the same time. The owners/operators of Seachange Lodge offered staff of the Tourism Office the opportunity to interview the other family.
Unfortunately there is no avenue available for operators of accommodation venues to contradict any complaints publicly claimed by clients.
The Internet has thousands of sites of uncontested comments by individual people. While a few comments are helpful and informative, some are amusing, while some are downright rude, incoherent, irrelevant, or biased.
Cotton said "You can't ban these on-line comments - that is like de-inventing the atomic bomb - and I am in favour of all these methods of modern communication. But we need a fair crack of the whip".
The fact is ‘You can please some of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all the people all the time.’ We can only trust that would-be travelers are able to make a fair assessment themselves, over several reviews and not act slavishly to any particular review. Otherwise, sites like Trip Advisor become little more than an electronic version of ‘Indian Whispers’. By the time the saying gets to the end of the line, it is completely changed, with no redress to the original. Entire governments have been brought down by such scare-mongering tactics.
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Feel Free To Contact Wendy on admin@youmesupport.org
Dr Wendy Stenberg-Tendys and her husband are CEO's of YouMe Support Foundation (http://youmesupport.org). They provide high school education grants for children who are without hope. The are also owner/operators of the unique property Seachange Lodge, (http://seachangelodge.com.
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