12 February 13, 2022The Sunday Times
Travel Analysis
One fraudster offered
to post 50 five-star
reviews for £220
and a negative rating can cost a business
as much as a fifth of its customer base.
In another survey, in which 4,000
travellers were polled by the homestay
company Plum Guide, 40 per cent of
respondents described themselves as
“obsessed” with reading reviews, while
almost half said they would feel
“emotionally distressed” if they booked
a holiday without first reading reviews.
Tripadvisor research based on a
sample of 9,000 consumers found that
75 per cent of respondents considered
online reviews “extremely or very
important when making travel decisions”.
So important is positive feedback to the
bottom line that an entire industry has
developed to provide help and support.
Most reviews are legitimate, many,I
n February 2001 a tourist whose
name has been forgotten pressed
send on the first Tripadvisor
review — changing dining,
shopping and travel for ever.
By 2017 Tripadvisor had reached
500 million reviews, and last week the
Massachusetts-based company
announced that a five-star report from
SmellieSmurf of Charlotte, North
Carolina, about her holiday at the Four
Seasons Resort in Peninsula Papagayo in
Costa Rica, was the billionth. She
especially enjoyed the golf carts.
Since the former, Tripadvisor has
published reviews from most, if not all,
earthly locations accessible to humanity:
Antarctica, 575 reviews; Mount Everest,
426 reviews; Timbuktu, 55; and the
Albatross Bar on Tristan da Cunha — one
of the most remote pubs on Earth — 6.
Tripadvisor’s most reviewed attraction
is the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, with
more than 164,000 postings, including
1,089 who rated Gaudí’s masterpiece
“terrible”, often down to their dismay in
discovering the basilica was unfinished.
The online-review industry’s ever-
increasing reach has resulted in — and
fostered — a striking dependency that
will be familiar to anyone who has
wavered when booking a hotel or
holiday without the reassurance of that
little row of coloured-in stars.
Customer reviews wield extraordinary
commercial clout. Research by the
experience-management multinational
Qualtrics XM revealed that 91 per cent of
people aged 18 to 34 trust online reviews
as much as personal recommendations —REVIEW
As Tripadvisor passes a billion reviews,
Chris Haslam looks into an industry
that appears increasingly easy to game
OBSESSED
WE’RE
though, aren’t. One in five respondents
to the Plum Guide survey said that they
had been “let down” by misplaced trust in
the veracity of reviews, and investigations
reveal that the industry is engaged in a
covert cyberwar against fraudsters using
artificial intelligence and robots to give
unscrupulous businesses the edge.
After the ski-tour operator Absolutely
Snow received a few bad reviews relating
to a drainage issue in one of its chalets,
it received a cold call from a “lead
generation” company asking whether
it wanted to improve its profile. “Bad
reviews are detrimental for business
because people pick up on negativity
more than positivity,” said Duncan Gilroy,
Absolutely’s managing director. “This guy
said he could fix that. He said his companyws,
me
nts
hey
rust in
ations
n a
using
vetely
ating
ts,er
dy
Gilroy,
is guy
mpanyBUT CAN WE TRUST THEM?