How to navigate the changing world of user·generated reviews

Power to the Real People
How to navigate the changing world of user·generated reviews
WANT TO START AN ARGUMENT?

 Just bring up the topic of user-generated reviews to a group of weIl-traveled friends.You know . . . those ratings hy "real" people found on TripAdvisor,Yelp, and the like. Many travelers swear by ’em. But there’s a vocal minority who think they’re deeply flawed, maybe even fraudulent, ‘" Both are right, in a way. In principle, user-gencrated reviews are an ideal way to find honest opinions from folks just like us; they can be more useful for hotel and restaurant recommendations than a guidebook, which is out dated almost from the moment it rolls off the press. But in practice, they’ve been tainted by the travel industry.

     Some of the reviews on these sites are bogus, and even the real ones are written by people with an extreme experience to report-either an exceptionally good one or an outrageously bad one. As a result, user-generated reviews paint a picture that’s distorted at best and, at worst, downright deceptive. So what’s the problem? You. More than 81 percent of hotel guests say they’re influenced by these online reviews_, which means there’s a better-than-average chance you’ve clicked on a hotel rating, read it, believed it, and booked a room based on the write-up.You really shouldn’t do that. I shouldn’t either, but, like you, I can’t seem to help it.

      I consult these sites regularly (I especially love Yelp ’s smart phone app, with its Foursquare-like check-ins from my phone). I’ve chosen restaurants and hotels based on these ratings. It’s human nature, even when we know the source is flawed. I’ve watched the evolution of hotel and restaurant reviews over the years. ]ust a decade ago, you had to turn to a travel agent, a trusted guidebook, or a magazine like this one for information about a destination.The two dominant sites,TripAdvisor andYelp, promised democracy of opinion. (TripAdvisor started in 2000,Yelp in 2004.) But they evolved into more of a dictatorship.

     The Internet didn’t so much challenge the old hegemony as create a new one, siphoning the power from old media, and establishing a few powerful key players. Interestingly, the information revolution didn’t set information free; it consolidated it. Having just a couple of dominant sites makes it far too easy for hotels and restaurants to manipulate them.The antics range from paying guests and even nonguests to write positive reviews about a business, to companies creating fake accounts and using them to badmouth their competition. Take the example of a restaurateur in Costa Rica who created mul- tiple fake TripAdvisor accounts,including-I’m not making this up—"Debbie from Dallas," and bombarded the site with positive reviews about his tavern. "Withindays I was rated a perfect five,"he bragged. "During that same time my competitors’ ratings mysteriously declined.

     " I passed the information on to the Tbday show_, which interviewed him for an expose on user-generated reviews. The emerging field of online reputation manage- ment specializes in making businesses look better than they are. In the hands of the practitioners of these dark arts, online sites stand little chance. Last year, TripAdvisor essentially admitted to its credibility problem when it changed its hotel review section slogan from "reviews you can trust" to "reviews from our community" in response to a British Advertising Standards Agency investigation. The review sites continue to insist their ratings are truthful. TripAdvisor claims it employs moderators who screen out "questionable" reviews. It also uses automated tools to review content and flag bogus ratings, but it won’t give details, insisting that explaining the system would help people game it.Yelp, too_, says it has an almost foolproof fraud-detection algorithm, but businesses complain that it ensnares as many legitimate reviews as it does bogus ones. Nice try, guys. But hegemonies don’t last forever. A decade is an eternity in Internet time. New websites that allow you to review your airline seat, hotel room, or restaurant are springing up, chipping away at the primacy of the big review sites. For example, Starwood Hotels.