Read a good article recently by Marina O'Loughlin, a restaurant critic and food writer, who really dislikes Tripadvisor - what do you think? Is it a useful tool or is it too full of fake reviews to be of any significant use?
Personally, I think it started out as a good concept but now it's often a case of having to disregard so many obviously malicious reviews, so many 'one review' glowing reviews that at times it can be difficult to get a balanced view. I've lost count of the times we've eaten somewhere and had an excellent meal, only to find that it's number 972 out of god knows how many in that city. Whenever we go somewhere new, like Marina O'Loughlin, we tend to try for personal recommendations from friends, locals etc rather than rely on dodgy ratings from TA.
"It was in a small seaside town in Croatia that my dislike of TripAdvisor petrified into loathing. The site’s top listing wasn’t one of the ad-hoc shacks down by the beach that sold the freshest fish grilled over wood (where my nose would have led me), but we went along with it all the same. Never before or since have I eaten in a restaurant where our hosts fished the meal from a vast chest freezer in full view. Remember to write about us on TripAdvisor, they urged as we dolefully paid our bill, giving us a free liqueur that tasted of Cif and cynicism.
Despite the fact that virtually every week brings a new story about how useless TripAdvisor is, how it enables users who are corrupt/greedy/mendacious, the site trundles on like a marauder, spewing an ever-increasing volume of freely given, unpaid “content”, as it has since its conception in 2000. Despite all evidence to the contrary – in 2013 its CEO, Stephen Kaufer, pocketed more than $39m – TripAdvisor has convinced its contributors that it is “one of us”, like a digital version of Nigel Farage or Donald Trump.
Regardless of the fact that it is riddled with fakes and idiots, a huge number of otherwise sensible people continue to give credence to the aggregated opinion of, at best, unqualified strangers. A 2015 government-backed Competitions & Markets Authority investigation found that UK consumers spend more than£23bn a year after reading online reviews. “Only a very small proportion [of respondents] felt that it was ‘not very likely’ or ‘not at all likely’ that the reviews were written by genuine customers,” the report concluded."
Read the rest here:
Five stars – says who? My trouble with TripAdvisorJF