A matter of opinion

In 2000, four years before anyone had even heard of Facebook, Trip Advisor was founded, paving the way for user-generated content (UGC).

Fast-forward 13 years and Trip Advisor remains the Goliath of the travel user review industry – the US site now boasts more than 200 million unique users a month, 100 million reviews and opinions, and more than 60 new contributions a minute. The sheer breadth of its reviews are its tour de force, and chief executive and founder Stephen Kaufer has estimated that 10 per cent of all travellers use the site to plan their trips.

At the same time, other websites are emerging with different types of UGC – be it more focused, more attractive or more authentic.

Such is the influence of consumer opinion that it’s been found to have a direct effect on hotel room rates. Last year, Cornell University’s Centre for Hospitality Research published The Impact of Social Media on Lodging Performance, a report that analysed data from Reviewpro, STR, Travelocity, Comscore and Trip Advisor. “If a hotel increases its scores by one point on a five-point scale – say, from 3.3 to 4.3 – it can increase its price by 11.2 per cent and still maintain the same occupancy or market share,” it found.

In an era where online reputation is everything, such sites have the power to make or break a hotel or airline, a fact of which the travel industry is fully aware. Dutchyankee, a contributor to our online forum (www.businesstraveller.com/discussion), writes: “As a hotelier, these review sites can have a direct impact on my business, both positive and negative. [With Trip Advisor] fictitious reviews are rampant and competitors can leave negative reviews. The system has faults but it is one website we cannot afford to ignore.”

Following a complaint from online reputation specialist Kwikchex last year, the Advertising Standards Authority in the UK ruled that Trip Advisor had to drop its “reviews you can trust” slogan owing to a complaint from thousands of hoteliers over allegedly fake or defamatory reviews. It’s a problem the site takes seriously, and it has various systems in place that pick up the algorithms of fraudulent reviews.

“We have a team of almost 100 specialists who spend 24 hours a day making sure our reviews are real, and investigating in detail every report of suspicious content,” says Trip Advisor spokeswoman Emma Shaw. “If a review breaches our guidelines, it is removed.”

While all sites have the potential for fake reviews, Trip Advisor’s size makes them more visible – The Telegraph has reported that every day around 13,000 of the site’s reviews are deemed “questionable”. This Achilles’ heel has presented an opportunity for rival sites such as www.hotelme.com.

Officially set to launch this month, the US site, a joint venture between USA Today and District Hospitality Partners, aims to “provide consumers with the most trusted source of online reviews”, according to co-founder and managing partner Trip Schneck. “There are a lot of disingenuous reviews out there,” he says. “The solution was to ensure that the person writing the review of each hotel has actually stayed there.”

While there are already booking sites that offer a similar system for authenticating reviews by email (such as www.booking.com, www.expedia.com and www.hotels.com), hotelme.com can validate reviews regardless of how they were booked. “We’ve got a patent pending on our business process for comparing reviewer information with guest history records stored in a hotel’s central red system or property management system,” Schneck says. “We’re not looking at sensitive guest information or credit card data. We’re sending a message through the API [application programming interface] we’ve created that says: ‘This guest says they stayed here on this date, can you confirm or deny?’”

Hotelme.com works by partnering with brands such as Four Seasons, Hyatt, Radisson Blu, and Preferred Hotels and Resorts, which allow its API to access their systems. “We’re talking to a lot of big brands, including Marriott and Hilton,” Schneck says. “We’re hoping that by the end of the year we’ll have at least 25,000 hotels that we can authenticate.”

The aspirations of hotelme.com are clear – to prioritise quality over quantity. But it remains to be seen whether it will be able to create enough content – and enough partnerships – to attract users who are used to seeing an array of opinions about everything from bed and breakfasts in Brighton to boutique hotels in Bangkok.

Robert Cole, founder and chief executive of Rock Cheetah, an online marketing consultancy for hotels, argues that authenticating reviews can actually alter their quality inversely: “Trip Advisor has a very tricky business model, but when it comes to reviews, it doesn’t want to validate them – for a good reason,” he argues. “If you don’t authenticate them, you get unbridled, honest opinions from people that you may not get if their name was tied to a booking.”

Trip Advisor’s Shaw says: “Requiring a proof of stay would dramatically reduce the number of reviews on the site. The average traveller reads dozens of reviews before booking to get the complete picture and make an educated decision based on the opinions of many. We stand by our proven model, which allows hoteliers to respond.”

Last year, it launched its “Friend of a Friend” feature, allowing users to see reviews from their Facebook connections. Engaging with social media is a growing trend among sites – clutter-free homepages with white backgrounds, large images, and photos of reviewers with personal profiles are common, while many use people’s Facebook information, offering the chance to see friends’ recommendations as well as those of an anonymous online community.

Gogobot (www.gogobot.com), which was launched in 2010, is led by Travis Katz, former head of international operations at Myspace. As well as reading and posting reviews, users can peruse recommendations from their Facebook friends and Twitter followers, post questions and use the advice to plan an itinerary. It’s an engaging site with a community feel and an emphasis on images.

UK-based travel review site Triptease was launched in March. It accumulated more than 35,000 unique users in its first month, and claims to “re-imagine travel reviews”. Founder Charlie Osmond says: “The grand vision is to disrupt Trip Advisor, but not in terms of numbers – in terms of quality, relevance and engagement.”

The site’s format – with reviews presented like glossy magazine spreads, dominated by images – doesn’t appear to lend itself to negative reviews. Users sign in, upload text and an image, choose a layout and write a headline in an attractive font before posting. So what would happen if somebody submitted a less aesthetically pleasing photo – say, of a dreary hotel room or bad meal in a restaurant? “You don’t have to be ugly to be negative,” Osmond says. “A negative review can still be beautifully typeset, for example. We have had negative reviews and people have uploaded photos of the issue or the challenge, and that helps to tell their story.”

Still, given that the site is designed to inspire, with reviews that are “beautiful, trustworthy and informative”, it is less likely that negative posts would get appreciation from fellow users and, consequently, gain the same exposure as positive ones – the more “likes” your review has, the more chance it has of appearing on the homepage, and users can only write further reviews after their first one has received three likes.

Another trend among sites is more detailed user profiles with an archive of their posts, which allows people to weigh up the quality and relevance of an entry based on their history and travel habits. It’s another step towards greater transparency – the aim being to encourage authors to take ownership of their reviews, and to be honest about whether they are a hotelier, a travel journalist or someone who seems to encounter a disproportionate amount of bedbugs.

Osmond believes Triptease’s emphasis on personal prestigewill help to reduce bogus reviews. “By making review creation a totally different experience, it means our reviewers are happy to reveal who they are – no one is allowed to hide behind a pseudonym,” he says. “We want to build a community very carefully. We want to create a place where people are positive when they have a great experience and constructive when they have a negative one.”

While it’s not foolproof – people will always be able to create phoney email accounts to set up a profile – it will be interesting to see whether Triptease’s focus on the review creator acts as a deterrent for foul play.

Although it’s great to get a spread of perspectives, sometimes you want to focus on the informed opinions of seasoned travellers. Businesstraveller.com’s sister platform, www.seatplans.com, is an airline review site with a mission to “help you find the best seat for your flight”. It not only features aircraft seat plans, product measurements and cabin images for more than 200 carriers, but also reviews from frequent flyers and in-depth Tried and Tested reports from the Business Traveller team.

Editorial director and founder Tom Otley says: “There are several similar sites but what makes seatplans.com different is that we have both user reviews and write-ups from our own journalists, against a backdrop of objective information provided by the airlines.”

The site will be redesigned later this year, allowing users to share reviews across social media sites and build their own profile with lists of their reviews. A seatplans.com app will also be launched. (To learn more about seatplans.com, scan the page opposite with the Blippar app.)

Some sites are also encouraging users to “follow” other users Twitter-style. Restaurant and nightlife review site www.zomato.com began in 2008, and now has 11 million users each month. It features independent reviews, ratings, menus and pictures for more than 90,000 restaurants across 20 cities – including London, Abu Dhabi, Doha, Dubai, Kolkata, Manila and Mumbai.

“We have a tiered system for reviewers,” says chief operating officer Pankaj Chaddah. “You join as a ‘Foodie’, you gain trust with the reviews you write and the followers you get, and improve your status to become a ‘Big Foodie’, a ‘Super Foodie’ or a ‘Connoisseur’.”

What does the future hold for such sites? Rock Cheetah’s Cole says: “I think the next step is for them to focus more on the purpose of people’s trips. I think ‘collaborative filtering’, which looks at your likes and dislikes, finds people who have common interests, and directs you to the hotels they like, is eventually where these sites will get to.”

While they may have their drawbacks, the power that user review sites give to consumers makes them a resource well worth tapping into.

How to get the most from review sites