Expert vs. Amateur Reviews
I’ve been following an ongoing discussion on the WIWIH forums about the effect that expert reviews and amateur reviews have on the reputation of a hotel. I find this discussion particularly interesting because it is directly related to the increasing use of user generated content by travelers in the decision making process. Trip Advisor, among others, have been using amateur user ratings for some time as a way of rating properties in an unbiased manner. The challenge they face now is that property owners have realized that they too can produce their own user generated content in order to skew the ratings. So exactly how reliable are user ratings? The answer comes down to statistics. Assuming that the majority of the users who rate these properties don’t work for the property and are regular travelers then you should be able to exclude the extremes on either end of the bell curve and come up with a reliable set of data that expresses the true rating of the hotel. That said, user comments are a totally different beast from user ratings and cannot be analyzed in the same way.
Another method for handling reviews and ratings is by using an online reputation system. Ebay’s feedback system, for example, has gone a long way to ensure that potential buyers and sellers are provided with a fairly accurate rating of the person with whom they are doing business. Unfortunately there is no equivalent system for travel and tourism products. Such a system would have to be completely unbiased and preferably not owned by one of the major GDS companies or an OTA. Any system owned and operated by any of these companies would be inherently biased. One such reputation system that shows promise is RapLeaf. RapLeaf’s system is very similar in design to Ebay’s feedback system except that the ratings are tied directly to you as an individual user. You could possibly use it to tie it directly to a corporate entity in the same way, but for now the system isn’t really designed for that. If they can figure out how to extend the reputation beyond personal reputation to corporate reputation, then the system would be more powerful because it would allow the reputation to go both ways. Imagine a system where a user leaves a rating or review for a hotel and the hotel and other users can determine the legitimacy of the rating based on the writer’s own reputation.
In summary, user generated reviews and ratings are not going to go away. Will someone post a negative review of your hotel? Most probably. Will the review have an impact on other users and potentially damage your hotel’s reputation? Most unlikely. The reality is that users who use online rating to determine their choices are looking for trends in negative feedback and not for one off negative comments. If one person complains that the quality of service was bad at a hotel, it can be flagged as a one off. If a hundred people complain about the hotel, then you’ve got some viable statistics. If you’re confident that your company can withstand the criticism and you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to lose by embracing online ratings and reviews.
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One Response to “Expert vs. Amateur Reviews”
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I like to read the ‘guest’ review. I like you said remove the extreme from both end of the bell and go with the middle of the road review. If there isn’t one then I move onto the next property. I try to avoid staying in an unrated by consumer property.