Article: The Blessing & Curse of Online Travel Reviews

[MEL_Traveller]

The title says it all, and I tend to agree.

On a recent trip to Vietnam, we were looking for a place nearby and picked a restaurant rated 4.9 with over 4,000 google reviews. It turned out to be underwhelming, service was average in both attentiveness and attitude, and the food was ok but nothing special, especially for the price.

Towards the end, we realized they were offering free drinks in exchange for 5-star reviews, which explains the inflated rating and volume. It did leave us feeling like it was more of a tourist trap than a genuinely top-tier spot.

That said, most places we’ve tried in Vietnam with ratings between 4.7 and 5.0 and over 1,000 reviews have generally been reliable.

Generally, we don’t tend to leave reviews. And when we do, it’s usually because the experience was poor enough that we feel others should be aware.

There again is another factor… in Australia we have some of the best asian food! The freshest ingredients and excellent chefs. Often the food is better in Australia than the country itself (especially if going ‘local’ in Australia).

Many of the reviews are from travellers who don’t benefit from that kind of quality locally.

 

[Warks]

The title says it all, and I tend to agree.

On a recent trip to Vietnam, we were looking for a place nearby and picked a restaurant rated 4.9 with over 4,000 google reviews. It turned out to be underwhelming, service was average in both attentiveness and attitude, and the food was ok but nothing special, especially for the price.

Towards the end, we realized they were offering free drinks in exchange for 5-star reviews, which explains the inflated rating and volume. It did leave us feeling like it was more of a tourist trap than a genuinely top-tier spot.

That said, most places we’ve tried in Vietnam with ratings between 4.7 and 5.0 and over 1,000 reviews have generally been reliable.

Generally, we don’t tend to leave reviews. And when we do, it’s usually because the experience was poor enough that we feel others should be aware.

We were wandering the backstreets of Danang and spotted a restaurant rated about 4.8 or so but with probably a hundred reviews. Well it was one of those front room of the house restaurants with the kids doing their homework and the dad watching TV in between going back to the kitchen. We were the only ones in there and it was one of the best meals we had in Vietnam. One of the very few times I've written a review was for that place (Google Reviews).

 

[eastwest101]

Agree with the main points of the article. I think others have mentioned the inherent negative bias in review websites as it only used to be people who had a really bad/terrible experience from a service provider who would go to the effort of signing up and leaving a bad review. This might have now changed but I still think it s a thing - a bit of a "meh" or "as expected" reviews are often under-represented, and in the case of a company genuinely going out of its way and doing outstanding customer service is often the prompt for people to go online and submit a positive review, that is the customer wants to rewards the excellent service.

As many here say, any business should generate a statistical bell curve of negative though to typical to outstandingly positive reviews in a bell curve distribution, if you see part of that bell curve missing entirely, you instantly question the statistical validity of the sample......

Fake reviews - yes, really is a problem for the owners of the review websites to address, as it really is their business model and revenue that is affected if trust is lost in the content of the reviews, a bit like say an electoral system that no one trusts will not generate any interest in voters. Probably more dangerous now with the potential for AI/Bot activity to flood a site with fake reviews, drowning out the actual human, thoughtful content. Obviously, a person who has submitted many reviews is a more trustworthy source than a brand-new 1-review entry. Some review websites that are trying to be impartial have resorted to providing verification of purchase and rewarding people who can prove that they genuinely used the goods or services (i.e. proof of purchase) to promote the genuine reviews to the top of the page (this verification itself can be costly/labour-intensive).

Business Pressure to leave favourable reviews - I would have Zero starred that Safari company with the full explanation that management was pressuring staff to obtain favourable reviews and threatening staff with lower reviews of less work or even termination. Thats transparency in action right there. This pressure is along the lines of the gamification of customer reviews, and can be seen as a slippery slope on the way to a "digitised tipping system" or even social credit Black Mirror style, where the incentives can lead to perverse outcomes i.e staff too busy soliciting positive reviews to do their job well.