The Blessing & Curse of Online Travel Reviews

Online reviews have been an absolute game-changer, putting lots of power back in the hands of travellers.

When researching a trip, you can easily see the real-world experiences of other travellers who’ve recently stayed at the hotel or eaten at the restaurant you’re thinking about booking. You can quickly find real-life photos online of the Emirates A350 Premium Economy seat, Qantas A321XLR Economy seat… or just about any other airline product. And you can instantly see the average of the ratings given by everyone who’s previously left a review.

If specific details are important to you, like whether the Wi-Fi actually works at a given hotel, you can filter through recent reviews to find that exact information.

Online reviews also incentivise businesses to provide great service. Indeed, many now rely on positive online reviews to attract future customers.

And if a business doesn’t do the right thing, customers can publicly hold them accountable by leaving a negative review. Often, this isn’t even necessary as the mere threat of a less-than-perfect review usually gets the business’ attention.

Clearly, the newfound prominence of online reviews has had many benefits. But there are also some downsides. Not all of them are obvious.

The scourge of fake reviews

When researching hotels in Istanbul some years ago, I came across one that was both well-priced and had lots of recent positive reviews. It seemed like a good deal, so I booked it.

As it turned out, the hotel was run-down and smelled like sewerage. Many of the advertised features weren’t actually available, and there were very few other guests staying there. So, why did it have so many good reviews, I wondered?

After inspecting the reviews more closely, I noticed that most seemed to have been written by the same person. All the positive reviews contained similar wording and the same spelling mistakes. They were all written by anonymous people who had left only one or two reviews on the various review platforms. It didn’t take long to realise that they were probably written by the owner, in order to drown out the negative reviews left by genuine guests.

I contacted various review platforms to alert them to the fake reviews. Some of them took down the ones that obviously weren’t genuine, but others didn’t. And I learned to be more careful with scrutinising reviews in future when something doesn’t seem right.

Not all fake reviews are positive, either. I’ve seen highly negative reviews left punitively by people who simply experienced a minor service failure – or may not have even been customers at all. Just as fake positive reviews can hurt consumers, fake negative reviews can seriously and unfairly hurt good businesses.

Businesses pressuring customers to leave a 5-star review

While fake reviews have long been a concern, there’s another type of review that I find more insidious.

Last year, a friend and I went to Kenya for a holiday. We wanted to do a safari, and there were many companies to choose from when researching online. We ended up going with a particular tour company because it had a lot of positive reviews.

Now, the tour itself was great and I liked our guide. But on the penultimate day of the tour, I found out the real reason why this particular company had so many good online reviews.

As we were driving back to our campsite on the last evening, the guide asked every single person on the tour to leave a review on both Tripadvisor and SafariBookings. He was absolutely insistent that, in both of these reviews, we would mention his full name.

The next morning, as we drove back to Nairobi to end the tour, he checked whether each person had left a review yet. I had agreed to write a review on Tripadvisor, but hadn’t written one on SafariBookings, and the guide insisted that I needed to do that as well.

“I’m not forcing you, I’m begging you,” he said. As we chatted about this, I discovered that the company wouldn’t continue giving work to guides who didn’t get five-star reviews from all their guests.

On one hand, I was happy with the tour and our guide did a good job. On the other hand, I couldn’t help but feel a bit uncomfortable because the reason we’d chosen that company in the first place was because it had lots of reviews. If this is how the company managed to get all those reviews, I’m not really a fan of that. And I don’t really want to reward a company that threatens its workers if they don’t get a five-star review from every guest.

We could have chosen any number of other companies that offered similar tours at similar prices. I can’t help wondering if those other companies are at a disadvantage, simply because they don’t pressure their guests in this way.

Review overload

Nowadays, we get asked to leave a review for just about everything. How was your Australia Post delivery? Did Qantas Customer Care resolve your query to your satisfaction? How would you rate the quality of the toilet paper you bought yesterday? (And if you don’t respond, you can be sure of a follow-up email to “remind” of the importance of having your say!)

While it’s easy to ignore an email, it’s hard to ignore staff at a hotel or restaurant who are already fishing for a good review when you’ve only been there for five minutes. More than once, hotel lounge or restaurant staff have even given me a business card containing their name and a QR code link to a review website.

When this happens, it’s pretty obvious to me that the business has promised a bonus for every five-star review mentioning the employee’s name.

I think it’s great when businesses want to reward their staff for providing good service. I don’t even mind being informed that employees mentioned in positive reviews will get a bonus. If I think it’s deserved and want to leave a review, then I will. But some staff take this to the extreme, focusing primarily on extracting a good review at the expense of providing good service!

A valuable currency

Like it or not, online reviews are now an extremely valuable currency in the travel industry. We just need to be a bit vigilant about blindly trusting them.