Hotel reviews: why consumers lose out

By Steve Keenan

I’ve been thinking a lot about reviews recently, particularly those of hotels.

Having spent years in consumer travel media, the only hotel review story was always Tripadvisor - mainly taking them to task over the fact that people could post reviews without having proven they stayed there.

It wasn’t about Tripadvisor per se (although it was the only site around) - it was a story about transparency. Personally, I have always liked Tripadvisor. I use it a lot for research and reckon I can tell a fake review a mile off. The good, or real ones, have always trampled over the dodgy and common sense prevailed.

But we move on. Now there is a plethora of other sites that have muscled into reviews, notably online travel agents like Hotels.com or laterooms.com. This makes sense: if you’re selling rooms, reviews are the lifesblood. And, more recently, Google has moved into the space.

So what? More reviews, the better, surely? Well, up to a point, Lord Copper.

There is still no aggregator that I can see, an independent site that pulls together all the reviews available and allows the consumer to make sense of the disparate sites.

Take the Balmer Lawn Hotel in the New Forest, for example. Tap the name in to Google and the first page of results includes six paid-for links, then the official site followed by dozens more booking sites - with Google’s results on the right.

It’s not ideal. The consumer has to move on, looking to escape commercial links in search of one site for independent reviews - but it is not likely to improve.

Newspaper and magazine reviews of an hotel get swamped down to the third or fourth pages of Google (and traditonal media is far too competitive to aggregate). New review sites like @triptease, which launches on March 4, will only add to the broad coverage.

Because essentially, there is no desire to serve the consumer - each site is out to capture browsers into their own site. The internet is working perversely in their interests.

Little wonder, then, 61% of European hoteliers spend between one to three hours per week reading and responding to online travel reviews, according to Choice Hotels. Because there so may platforms to respond to.

Choice, a franchise operation with 500 hotels in Europe, has responded by offering members Medallia, which scans blogs and social networking sites for mentions of Choice brand hotels. It’s about saving time when responding to comments.

But that’s a service for hoteliers. When will consumers see a platform that also scans all sites and gives an aggregation of comments in one place? It’s what consumers want - who will deliver?