GeoffM

Rankings are dictated simply by the score from reviews. They're displayed in reverse date order, ie newest first. How are the reviews manipulated?

I'm not saying it's perfect: every review site suffers from fake reviews, both good and bad. Changing focus slightly, even Amazon suffers from it in a massive way - yet they could have perfect control over it by only allowing reviews from people who have actually purchased the item, but they refuse to do so. I suspect there would be too few reviews if they did that.

I did have one of my TA reviews challenged by the hotel owner. I had photographic evidence so the review stayed. Amusingly I happened to see the owner on a TV documentary a few months later berating online reviews but he only got about 3 seconds of airtime, barely long enough to grunt.

Bob

They're moderated by a third party company though.

scrubbedexpat091

A good hotel will welcome Trip Advisor reviews and actually ask guests to write a review and respond to any issues that arise during a stay by replying to reviews and try and fix the issue in the complaint and many do.

Hotels who dislike or don't want on line reviews, well probably best to avoid those kinds of places.

Problem with hotels is there is no regulation for the most part of the industry, so hotel owners on the shady side will do all sorts of corner cutting and have less then clean rooms, its a make it look clean but don't spend time really cleaning anything type situation.

Problem is the chains are also no longer in the hotel biz but in the license our name out for obscene amounts of money biz and only inspect maybe once a year, gives advance notice they are coming, and then only checks a few rooms the hotel has selected and prepared in advance for inspection. The rest of the rooms might be less then stellar.

The fees these chains charge the properties are high, we pay 10 to 20k per month to use the name we use, its based on revenue.

Eats up a lot of revenue for the owner, so they try and cut corners to make up for it, overall revenue keeps declining as more and more people book online and not with the hotel directly.

Our hotel runs 99 on Expedia, we get 53 of that, so its a big cut in revenue when people book through 3rd party sites.

Hotel owners are having to become corner cutters as most costs are fixed or variable and can't really be reduced except in labor, so they cut back housekeeping and maintenance hours to save money.


If you stick to Hyatt, Marriotts and Hilton's of the world, its generally better as they cost so much to build and operate they are usually owned by large companies with large portfolios and deep pockets.

Day' Inn, Holiday Inn and small hotels, well that property might be the only one the owner owns, has no funds available, and revenue short falls, so they cut back back back to make ends meet.

GeoffM

To be fair, it's rare to find a dirty hotel room - if anything, usually a mistake rather than a deliberate cutback. The hotel I complained about, well it's probably the only negative review I've ever written, and our stay was a comedy of errors and Basil Fawlty to boot. Bed bugs (that was the photographic evidence - okay I lied in my first sentence!), food that was supposed to be gourmet but tasted like it came out of Tesco Value cans, a long declaration you had to sign your life away on in order to use one of the two poorly located Wifi routers, showers that required a degree in order interpret the long list of instructions on how to use, staff overruled or interrupted by the manager...

The problem with the reviews for that hotel is that virtually all of them were glowing, 4 to 5 star. The negative reviews were all one star. The only option was to give it 2 or 3 stars in order to be credible. I try to balance reviews with good and bad points, though I really struggled with anything good about this one hotel.

A Sheraton I stayed at recently (on points) fell way short of expectations. Initially they gave me the brush off ("sorry bout that, come again") but I complained to their corporate and ended up with about 3 different managers calling me and refunding over half the points. I wouldn't write a review about that as it was clearly not a typical stay, and they have made it right now, to their credit. And I most certainly didn't even mention reviews when talking to them - I find that sort of thing below the belt.

scrubbedexpat091

Corporate owned or managed properties or franchises that are part of large property management companies are more likely to do things and not worry about every penny.

Smaller properties owned by individuals or small companies with shallow pockets count every penny and at times won't do much if its going to cost the money in the short term.

moneypenny20

Just clicked on that link and the first thing I saw was '“This is my second visit to FOL and I have been dreaming of their fried shrimp since having the crab Landry the first time I was here.” Does that mean the crab was beyond shite and they never want it again?

gad33

I don't review on Yelp and rarely look at the reviews. A friend reviews and always checks Yelp for places to eat when we are in a new area but I think we'd do better if we randomly chose.

I am a reviewer on Trip Advisor. I like that establishments can respond to reviews, whether it is to say thank you, glad you enjoyed your stay, or sorry, or this is nothing like what happened.

Recently I was reading a review of a hotel where a large group had stayed and many of them had reviewed. One review was poor and another person wrote that the stay was nothing like that person had written and they were just the type of person who complained all the time.

AdobePinon

Rankings factor in more than review score. They certainly factor in the quantity of reviews, but I'm pretty sure some other things too.

As for manipulation, less than positive reviews get removed from certain businesses and not others. Some places seem able to flush all the bad reviews every few months. For others, bad reviews never seem to stand for more than a few days. There have been a couple of businesses that relocated here from Colorado or elsewhere that managed to keep all their 4 and 5 star reviews from out of state, but kept flushing all the local reviews with anything less. And some businesses occasionally flush the entire archive good and bad, and then collect three or four hundred highly positive reviews within a few weeks.

Back to Yelp - business owners can respond to Yelp reviews too. One difference is that Yelp usually shows you the response alongside the review as you're scrolling, whereas TA often makes you 'unhide' the response.

Both sites have their issues, but I usually find Yelp more trustworthy as long as there is a decent number of reviews.

GeoffM

Ah, there was some talk of reviews being removed en masse due to suspected fraud. Inevitably that can include some genuine ones too.

Horses for courses... for the same reason I prefer TA . But I agree on the quantity... usually.