Expedia promises “real hotel reviews by real customers”
Just days after completing its spin-off of TripAdvisor, Expedia has announced plans to expand its own online hotel reviews. The big difference is that Expedia says all its reviews will be verified, to the extent that they will all be written by people who have stayed at the place they review.
At the same time, Stephen Kaufer TripAdvisor’s chief exec dismissed public concern over fake reviews, saying, “Based on the scale at which we operate questions of planted reviews is more of a theoretical concern than a practical concern. The scale totally dominates the equation.” Kaufer was not able to offer a percentage of how many reviews are fake.
From Barbara De Lollis at USA Today’s Hotel Check-in
If you go to Expedia.com today, you’ll find an overhauled review database that contains some 4 million reviews written by people who Expedia says paid for and stayed in the hotel they wrote about.
“We like to call it the new source of truth, internally,” says John Kim, Expedia’s senior vice president of global products.
The strategy plays off recent stories about fake reviews posted on TripAdvisor, Yelp and other sites that don’t confirm whether an author has actually stayed at a particular property – or if they had some other agenda in writing a review.
“(Customers) have been asking for a source of reviews they can trust,” Kim says, citing stories of a “black market” of fake reviews on other review sites. How widely held a belief that is, however, isn’t clear.
“This has tested off the charts in our internal testing,” he told me. “People love the idea that our reviews are verified so you can’t randomly leave a review.”
How do you write a review on Expedia.com? After you’ve booked a hotel on Expedia and stayed there, Expedia sends you an e-mail that contains a link where you sign into your account. At that point, you’ll be given the option of writing a review for that specific hotel.
There is no avoiding fake reviews online. Anyone can book one of their own hotel rooms and then just write-off the small Expedia booking fee as a marketing expense. It is totally impossible to make it a fraud-free system at this point.
Eventually Google will be the ones to circumvent this situation by getting people ratings dished up by people in their circles and extended circles, as well as by reputable authors. Until then, buyer beware, and always read between the lines.
Perhaps – but at the moment, Google reviews are even more open to abuse than TripAdvisor and the rest. The problem with peer group reviews like cicles is that they’re unlikely to have wide experience.