Do you trust Travel Site Reviews?

[Guest fountainhall]

Just to wrap up my earlier posts.

 

Not unexpectedly, I heard nothing back from Tripadviser. And I still have had no response from any of the single post 5-star posters I wrote to, which only reinforces my view that they are total fakes. Unlike the last occasion when I faxed Tripadviser with what I believed to be a number of fake reviews and which resulted in most of the posts being deleted, all of those I listed this time remain on the site. And in the meantime, the number of single post 5-star reviews continues to outnumber the more honest reviews, most of which rate it in the 1-, 2- or occasionally 3-star categories (although I admit, some of the 5-star reviews have to be genuine, especially those who stayed on the Club floor rooms and in the suites).

 

So the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore has moved up to to #53, but still has by far the lowest ranking of any supposedly 5-star hotel in the city. Even if you can afford it - avoid it!

[Guest thrillbill8]

I book many of my hotel reservations (including the ones in BKK) through Agoda which keeps up with the seasonal rates and has some of the best discounts. The reviews use to publish the "negatives"(which took balls) but now Agoda doesn't publish ones complet review, but picks out what they think is appropriate to make the hotel look more positive. I have had my last 4 reviews on Agoda showing only the positives and not my recommendations how the hotel would be better or its weaknesses.

 

Also, one has to read 10??? reviews, not the first two or ten..and sometimes certain nationalities are a bit more demanding than others. Some Americans (who most likely have a higher income if they are traveling around the world) seem to be bitching about the smallest details such as, "Oh, the breakfast was average,with poor tasting coffee..." or "We had to wait 15 minutes to check into our room."

[Guest fountainhall]

I reckon more and more booking sites are going to edit reviews - or even cut them altogether. After all, they depend totally on the special rates they negotiate directly with the hotels themselves, and I do not think the hotels are going to tolerate much longer too many negative reviews. So they are probably already exerting some muscle. Also, many hotels' own sites offer the lowest available on-line rates with an additional offer to match anything you can find lower within a certain period of time - and sometimes a special extra bonus. So there will increasingly be less incentive for booking sites to print anything negative.

 

Add that to the shenanigans the hotels themselves get up to to flood sites like Tripadviser with fake reviews - and it will soon be very difficult to give much weight to such reviews.

[Guest]

1 If your hotel is mid market or above, it is reasonable to expect good coffee and food, on the basis the competition will offer it. So bitching about poor coffee is fair.

Some allowance need to be made for cheaper places, although I find these often offer satisfactory coffee.

Ultimately, if the coffee is weak & tasteless, why even offer it?

 

2 15 minutes before you can check in.

If you arrive at 13:00hrs, waiting 15 minutes for the room to be ready seems OK.

If you arrive in the evening, 15 minutes is very poor.

I don't recall ever being kept waiting that long.

I do remember having some strong words when a hotel made the mistake of starting to serve an obvious queue jumper before me, but after realigning their expectations even that didn't take 15 minutes.

[Guest fountainhall]

Should we be surprised? Having been at #60 in the tripadviser rankings just 14 months ago, the Marina Bay Sands continues to garner great reviews on the site, although less now come from first time posters. The campaign has clearly worked because the hotel is now at #40. Yet read the 1 and 2 star reviews and the old problems of huge lines at check-in and check-out, mediocre service and more continue. And even at #40, though, it remains the lowest ranked of SIngapore's 5-star hotels.

 

Thanks to comments from other posters, I now pay a lot more attention to reviews from booking engine sites who invite only those booked through their sites to submit reviews.

[ChristianPFC]

I very rarely read travel site reviews. When travelling by plane, times and price are the most important factors, everything else is insignificant (although I am now aware to take a closer look at their prices and conditions should I ever fly with Air Asia). For hotels, I usually stay in the same place or look around for alternatives while I am in Bangkok or Pattaya. Finally, I am easy to satisfy when it comes to hotel rooms.

[Guest fountainhall]

Tripadviser has come up again in the thread about the Travelzoo Hotel Muse offer on the Thailand Board. So I’m updating this thread which I started last year, in part following a hugely disappointing stay at the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore at the start of June. Checking on tipadviser, I pointed out a whole string of 5-star reviews from people who had made no other contributions. Out of curiosity, I had politely written to a dozen of them asking for clarification of something in their reviews. I received no replies – and these people have never since made another review! Clearly fakes! I wrote to tripadviser and suggested they be checked and deleted. They were not deleted.

 

In a post here a year ago, I noted that the hotel had climbed from #60 in the rankings up to #40 in just a couple of months or so. There it remains, and whilst the number of single poster reviews has dropped dramatically, it is still the lowest ranked 5-star hotel in Singapore. Check on agoda and you also find a reasonably high ranking, but you will also note that some posters continue to highlight problems that have been apparent since that hotel opened. E.g. this month one guest from Switzerland had to queue for 40 minutes at check-in. Another from Taiwan described room service as “absolutely terrible and slow”.

 

But it all just reinforces the point: don’t base your decision on any particular site or any particular review. Discount the best and the worst and look at a wide variety of other views before checking and comparing prices – and then committing.

[gerefan]

You could save yourself a lot of detective work!

Anyone can write a false good review of their own hotel.

No one will write a false bad review of their own hotel.

Therefore, ignore all positive reviews and just take note of the bad ones.

If there are plenty of bad ones AVOID.

Simple!

[Guest fountainhall]

SImple indeed! But hardly practical, surely? If you only look at the bad, then you'll get so depressed and not stay anywhere. That would certainly have been the case with the Marina Bay Sands!

 

My gut feel from looking at many tripadviser entries is that the the 'padding with great reviews' is far from universal practice. Only a few hotels seem to do it. Simply discounting rave posts from posters with no other contributions should therefore give you a better idea of what a hotel is like. Personally, I'd much rather have some general impressions about a hotel I was considering but had not stayed in before.

[Guest]

Anyone can write a false good review of their own hotel.

No one will write a false bad review of their own hotel.

Therefore, ignore all positive reviews and just take note of the bad ones.

One clearly over positive "self review" had the picture of the manager in his profile. The hotel was dreadful, but their manager gave it 5 stars on every count. He had made one other very negative review on another hotel in the same city & I doubt that would be a reliable review either. Writing bad reviews of the competing hotels would be an obvious tactic for dishonest types. So I'm not sure it makes sense to accept all the bad reviews as reliable.

[Guest snapshot]

I think you've just got to use common sense and develop your own filter as you do with everything.

 

When I skim through reviews, I start looking for niche facts first like, "there's lots of cafes and restaurants on the same street" or "the bathroom has a rain shower" (something I love) or "only bottom shelf spirits on offer in the club lounge" or "black label and absolute included in the exec lounge" etc... 

 

When I look at stuff that is more opinion perspective-affected, Iremain aware of how credible the reviewer is (country and number of reviews etc.) when reading this stuff. 

 

Sometimes you've got to factor in the character of the reviewer too. Some people are anally critical, have ridiculously misaligned expectations or somehow expect everything to be perfect and without mistakes. Where as I'm pretty tolerant and understanding of screw ups (it's more how they rectify it that matters to me) so I ignore stupid reviews like that.   

 

There's one serviced apartment I stay at regularly in Melbourne. Before the first time, I read this scathing review of the place that was clearly just some anally retentive guy with absurd expectations. 

 

I stayed there and loved it. Perfect location for me, gorgeous views, amazingly comfortable beds and efficient but very professional intelligent service. The apartments aren't super-luxurious or fitted out with overly expensive fittings like the Crown hotels are but are all new, modern and really well maintained, which is all I care about. It's just a fantastic place for the price you pay. Obviously that guy just had unrealistic expectations, so I went back and noticed all his reviews were like that..  

 

It's just common sense... 

 

More and more booking sites, it seems, are requesting customers to post reviews of their experience at hotels, flights an so on booked through the site.

This is driven by a combination of search engine optimisation (getting Google to rank their booking site higher and hence, attract more search traffic) and conversion maximisation (getting more visitors to make bookings)...

 

Other conversion maximisation tactics are having features like, "Mr Smith booked a deluxe room here 17 mins ago", "Mr John from South Yarra, Melbourne Australia wrote this review" and "people who are staying here have also booked to stay at xxxx".

 

Very clever stuff... 

 

You could save yourself a lot of detective work!
Anyone can write a false good review of their own hotel.
No one will write a false bad review of their own hotel.
Therefore, ignore all positive reviews and just take note of the bad ones.
If there are plenty of bad ones AVOID.
Simple!

I actually suspect some hotels are getting bashed by rivals. There are so many reviews now where the reviewer has taken really really close up shots of little dents and stains, trying to blow them up and make the place look terrible. And these reviews are completely out of place when all the other reviews (by perfectly credible reviewers) are saying the place is nice. It's almost as if someone is trying to screw with them. 

 

 

[TotallyOz]

Over the next few months, I'll be doing a tremendous amount of traveling in the USA from California to New York and many places in between.  I tend to use on a few hotel chains but I also look up on Trip Advisor where I want to stay to see the reviews. 

 

I have a convention in Las Vegas at the Hard Rock Hotel and I don't like that hotel so I found another one but I had never heard of it. I took a look at the reviews and there were hundreds of positive reviews and so I booked it to test it on this trip.  I liked the idea of a 1100 sq foot room in Vegas right off the strip for under 140.00 USD.  I'll try to report back here after I stay there.