There won’t be one particular incident that makes people realize that Joe Public’s hotel reviews aren’t worth believing.
It will be a combination of revelations, individual experiences, and Twitter and social media that will bust the myth that reviews on hotel review sites are truthful.
One of the problems with review sites is the temptation for hotel owners to submit fake reviews. For example, if a PR company approaches a hotel and says that they can get rave reviews of the hotel, which will increase their ranking. It can be difficult for a hotel to resist this.
The problem for review sites is that the number of reviews being placed on review sites is increasing, but they have no real way of checking if a review is true.
Several articles and questions have been raised in this regard.
Arthur Frommer of Frommer’s Travel Guides has raised concerns about this for a long time, here is one of his articles about it http://bit.ly/cTt9ZL. Then there’s Christopher Elliott, a traveler’s rights advocate. This is what he posted http://bit.ly/wWzuS.
These are respected people within the travel industry, but soon people will start to realize this. And while people in the past had no way of letting anyone know what had happened, now they will start posting their complaints on Twitter and their social network.
That in itself still wouldn’t kill these kinds of reviews. But with Google starting to include Twitter and social media reviews in search results. You will be left with so many conflicting hotel reviews that you won’t know who to believe.
Once you get to that situation, you’ll want to find a reliable source and that’s not going to be a pure review site. Someone who knows the traditional travel agent’s expertise can become the source people turn to.
