TripAdvisor has had a taste of its own medicine, when a new rating system of hotels, restaurants, and attractions on a 5-point scale without writing anything about the establishments to justify the score, led to such a critical outcry that TripAdvisor took it down last week, reported Tnooz.
The biggest criticism was the upsurge in ‘mysterious reviewers that had not been particularly active elsewhere on the site for months on end had prompted significant disquiet’. Diplomatically TripAdvisor said: ‘We are always open to the results of these tests and have listened to the valuable feedback we have had over the past few days. From this feedback, we recognise we have some work to do to ensure that the ratings are useful’, and therefore the company had quickly removed the new rating system. For example, one TripAdvisor reviewer had posted one review per year since 2008, but was found to have posted 560 ratings in a few days when the new system was introduced.
“We believe that the TipAdvisor community is seeking many ways to provide feedback, whether via ratings, photos, room tips, or other opinions, and we will continue to look at ways to gather these opinions to help travelers plan and have the perfect trip”, said a TripAdvisor spokesperson. Hundreds of comments were received in reaction to the short-lived rating system, and while TripAdvisor is still collecting the information, it is no longer displaying it.
On-line reputation management company and TripAdvisor arch enemy KwikChex added its criticism, saying that the new controversial rating system would lead to even more TripAdvisor ‘mistrust and distortion‘. The company claims that the rating system generated content from ‘pop-unders’, which are completed by many reviewers just to get rid of them. It also said that it was a surprise that TripAdvisor had introduced a new rating system when its reputation was already at such a low, given the ‘rising concern about deception and malice on the web’, and an increase in the requirement for ‘greater reliability and an end to anonymous bullying’.
KwikChex also criticised the 30 million reviews on the site, about which TripAdvisor prides itself, many of which are out of date and therefore useless. The company is pushing for a code of conduct for feedback sites, so that users can have more trust in the reviews they read. They are also planning to publish information to show how easily feedback resource and review sites can be ‘abused’, reports Travelmole. In its defence, TripAdvisor replied that it regularly scans its site for reviews with bias, ‘to identify potential fraud’! The company has said that its new rating system has not influenced the rankings in the Popularity Index.
Many establishments in the hospitality industry will laugh at TripAdvisor’s claim: ‘We take the authenticity of all content of the site extremely seriously as the integrity of the content on TripAdvisor is fundamental to our success’. They are grateful to KwikChex for speaking out on their behalf, many having been bitten by biased, exaggerated, and blatantly untruthful reviews on TripAdvisor!
Chris von Ulmenstein, Whale Cottage Portfolio: www.whalecottage.com Twitter:@Whale Cottage
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