Tag Archives: KwikChex

WhaleTales Tourism, Food, and Wine news headlines: 17 March

March 17, 2014

Tourism, Food, and Wine news headlines

* Lufthansa is now allowing unlimited use of electronics by its passengers.

* SAA has received delivery of six A320 aircraft this year, benefiting the airline on African routes and in being more environmentally friendly.

* TripAdvisor is once again under suspicion, with its China website causing concern about false reviews by prolific reviewers, a KwikChex analysis has found.

* French air traffic controllers are reported to be on a 24 hour strike tomorrow, affecting air traffic across Europe.

* Accolade Wines has redesigned the packaging of its Kumala brand, ‘most loved South African export Continue reading →

TripAdvisor gets poor rating on its customer rating authenticity!

TripAdvisor is increasingly coming under pressure from KwikChex, a reputation management company representing major hotels in the United Kingdom and the USA. Not only has the company threatened to take TripAdvisor to court over its unauthenticated ‘customer reviews’, taken TripAdvisor to the Advertising Standards Authority in the United Kingdom and successfully been able to get its overstated advertising claims removed, but now it has introduced a system whereby hospitality establishment rating systems are rated on customer feedback authenticity, giving Trip Advisor a paltry 2 stars, reports Tnooz!

On TripAdvisor ‘reviewers’ rate restaurants and accommodation establishments on a five point scale. The KwikChex rating evaluates the customer authenticity, a rating system earning 5 stars if the customer’s real name (and not an anonymous name as on TripAdvisor) is revealed, and verifying that a booking was made at the establishment. A one star rating reflects that the system has no means of checking the authenticity of the content, one of the biggest complaints against TripAdvisor, given that reviews can be written by owners and their friends and family, or at the opposite end, by competitors, ex-suppliers, and ex-staff. A rating of 2 out of 5 for TripAdvisor by KwikChex therefore is the second worst rating that the rating website could achieve, sharing the rating with Yelp. Booking.com achieved a 5 star rating from KwikChex.

KwikChex has also made a submission to the USA Securities and Exchange Commission about its concerns about TripAdvisor’s ability, or lack of, to authenticate reviews on its site, and it has made a submission to the European Court of Human Rights, in that ‘individuals are unable to defend themselves against defamation and harassment online’, when personal attacks against named individual staff members are made in TripAdvisor reviews.

Even though no South African hotels are unlikely to subscribe to KwikChex, the accommodation and restaurant industry worldwide should be grateful for the dogged determination of this company to make TripAdvisor a much more credible source of travel information.

Chris von Ulmenstein, Whale Cottage Portfolio: www.whalecottage.com Twitter:@WhaleCottage

TripAdvisor gets a taste of terrible write-ups from its own reviewers!

March 12, 2012

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

TripAdvisor slammed by UK advertising standards body for ‘misleading’ reviews!

February 1, 2012

TripAdvisor is hated by hospitality players if they receive poor reviews, and loved by those that perform well. Many in the industry are not bothered by its reviews, despite the negative impact that they can have, because they lack trustworthiness. Now the British Advertising Standards Authority has ruled against the UK TripAdvisor website for its misleading claims that the reviews are ‘trustworthy’, a welcome ruling for all establishments in the hospitality industry worldwide!

The Tripadvisor claims of ‘reviews you can trust’, ‘from real travellers’, ‘trusted advice from real travellers’ were found by the Advertising Standards Authority to be ‘misleading because the company could not prove reviews were genuine or from real travellers’. In its ruling, the Advertising Standards Authority stated that the TripAdvisor claims ‘implied to consumers that all review content would be genuine and that users might not be able to detect and separate non-genuine content‘. TripAdvisor has made the copy changes on its site, it says, and hit back at the Authority, calling it ‘out of touch with real people’ and ‘The ASA ruling flies in the face of common sense, and is out of touch with the millions of real people who use and trust consumer review sites like ours every day’. The company also stated that it stands by its‘independently endorsed review integrity process. The ASA upheld the complaints on the basis that we could not provide 100% certainty that every single review on the site was written by a real traveller and could be trusted. No system, verified or not, could provide this‘.

The TripAdvisor complaint was lodged by two hotels and UK reputation management company Kwikchex, a company which is becoming a thorn in TripAdvisor’s side, in threatening a class action on behalf of 120 British and American hotels against the review website for its ‘defamatory statements’, partly precipitated by the annual TripAdvisor ‘Dirtiest Hotels’ list, based on its reviewers’ comments re cleanliness. TripAdvisor CEO Steve Kaufer is quoted on Tnooz as saying that the company will no longer publish this list, in part due to the class action threat, one would suspect, as well as stating that the company wants to ‘stay more on the positive side’. TripAdvisor will be publishing more ‘best of’ lists this year, he said.

TripAdvisor hotel complainants argue that the reviews are ‘untrue and damaging to their business or legally unsubstantiated’. Kwikchex is demanding that all defamatory statements about hotels and their staff be removed, or else face the class action. TripAdvisor does allow hotel business management to reply to reviews, but has very strict guidelines of not allowing disparaging comments related to the reviewers, not mentioning the guests’ names (reviewers write anonymously), and often refusing to post the hotel reply, in our experience. The company is also seeking information about TripAdvisor’s algorithm for the rating system for hotels ranked in a city. One is well aware of hotels and restaurants writing their own positive reviews, and therefore the rankings are not trustworthy either. TripAdvisor does flag suspicious self-written reviews on its site, and does admonish the establishments.

Kwikchex says its communication with TripAdvisor has become more ‘fruitful’.

In our experience guest have written reviews about guest houses that they have not stayed in, have written exaggerated ‘reviews’ about their stay, are personally disparaging, do not acknowledge service recovery and refunds given, are used as a blackmail tool in return for refunds, and generally smack of vindictiveness for mainly uncommunicated problems during the stay. Each establishment should have an opportunity to fix a defect, given that it is done so on the same day. It will be interesting to observe how KwikChex drives the future of TripAdvisor, as more hotels join the company and place pressure on this bully review site!