Tripadvisor has been worse than useless in a lot of places for a while now. Even back in 2015 when I went to India every place was gaming it hard. In Costa Rica a hostel we stayed at offered free shots in exchange for a TA review.
Like Yelp, review sites are a weird niche where if you get too big, your subjects start working to game the system, and the value of your product begins to degrade. Stack Overflow has experienced a similar effect.
Of course. But that's why as a user the service degrades to a point where it's worse than nothing at all.
I stayed in a place in India with glowing Trip Advisor reviews that had rat turds on the bed. When I checked some of the reviewers, I noticed they were cranking out very similar boilerplate reviews for properties all over the place. Almost every place I stayed at in India begged me to write positive reviews for them. I know TA has since tried to clean a lot of this up.
But if you can find a less popular source of reviews which isn't worth someone's time to game - then you get a much better chance at an authentic rating/reviews.
I was almost stranded in Colorado while driving during a snowstorm. I reached out to my girlfriend and asked her to help me look up motels as I didn't have good internet service.
She said that a small motel near me had great reviews. "This was the best part of our trip to Colorado!". 4.5 stars on TripAdvisor.
I decided to check in. It was clearly immediately a mistake. There were so many red flags - from the weaving, amphetamine addled check in clerk, to the smoke stained room with ripped, stained bedsheets, and how the proprietor didn't even give me a room key. The room door could not be locked from the inside - the knob was smooth and no deadbolt. There's no way those reviews could be legitimate. The hotel was terrifying and I left after 20 minutes and filed a CC chargeback.
I looked it up myself and the place had 1.5 stars on Yelp, 2 on Google, 5 on Facebook and as mentioned, 4.5 on TripAdvisor. Upon reading and comparing, the Facebook and TA reviews seemed obviously fake. Yelp contained stories of the manager talking to the children of guests at the vending machine in an incoherent way and asking 'if they'd seen Billy' and various other disturbing stories.
I looked into the manager, Wayne, and found his Facebook page. It was filled with references to Satan worship, group sex and demonic possession. The necklace he wore which I thought was a Star of David was actually a pentagram, as displayed in his collection on FB. He had photos of his dog that he claimed depicted demonic possession on his FB page, as well as photos of their satanic altar at the motel.
So, my conclusion was that TripAdvisor and Facebook are very, very bad at preventing false reviews compared to Yelp or Google.
Enforcing a 'black hole approach' for gaming the system then leads to an inverted instance of the same problem: game the system, in an obvious fashion... but for your competitor. This leads to your competitors getting 'black holed' and there you are at the top of the searches.
It's unscrupulous, absolutely, but I imagine it's very hard (if not impossible) to prove who is or is not performing the gaming.
> Even back in 2015 when I went to India every place was gaming it hard. In Costa Rica a hostel we stayed at offered free shots in exchange for a TR review.
Low tech/low cost warfare against the tech marketing power houses always works.
This perfectly describes my experience with Amazon. It was my go-to store for just about everything until around 2017. The reviews used to be so helpful in pointing out features I didn’t even know I wanted and problems I didn’t even know I should be looking for but now the reviews are less than worthless to me. It just isn’t worth the effort to pick through and decide which are legitimate.
After gaining some fame from that article, the author has continued his shenanigans: when asked for TV interviews he sent lookalikes of himself to be interviewed.
Tripadvisor has become pretty bad anyway. There are so many great experiences in any new city, but Tripadvisor is pushing hard on the ones that benefit them, rather than me.
Same, despite what people have been saying on gaming reviews, I found the best coverage through Europe in terms of local reviews for smaller places. There were even heated arguments with the owners on how a particular dish was mangled or not, and I took this to represent authenticity.
similarly, I've found TripAdvisor pretty useful for travels around Taiwan, HK, China, and Japan - the quality of reviews and recommendations written by Chinese/Japanese tourists is quite high, and helped me discover some interesting, smaller local attractions and restaurants while abroad
My travel experience in the UK was immeasurably better without TripAdvisor results in a google search. As soon as I removed TA's results I found https://www.walkhighlands.co.uk/ which is a terrific way to explore the Scottish Highlands.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 65.1 ms ] threadLike Yelp, review sites are a weird niche where if you get too big, your subjects start working to game the system, and the value of your product begins to degrade. Stack Overflow has experienced a similar effect.
Unless you make the penalty for gaming the system a 'black hole' approach (ie, you no longer show up on searches), people will game the system hard.
I stayed in a place in India with glowing Trip Advisor reviews that had rat turds on the bed. When I checked some of the reviewers, I noticed they were cranking out very similar boilerplate reviews for properties all over the place. Almost every place I stayed at in India begged me to write positive reviews for them. I know TA has since tried to clean a lot of this up.
But if you can find a less popular source of reviews which isn't worth someone's time to game - then you get a much better chance at an authentic rating/reviews.
She said that a small motel near me had great reviews. "This was the best part of our trip to Colorado!". 4.5 stars on TripAdvisor.
I decided to check in. It was clearly immediately a mistake. There were so many red flags - from the weaving, amphetamine addled check in clerk, to the smoke stained room with ripped, stained bedsheets, and how the proprietor didn't even give me a room key. The room door could not be locked from the inside - the knob was smooth and no deadbolt. There's no way those reviews could be legitimate. The hotel was terrifying and I left after 20 minutes and filed a CC chargeback.
I looked it up myself and the place had 1.5 stars on Yelp, 2 on Google, 5 on Facebook and as mentioned, 4.5 on TripAdvisor. Upon reading and comparing, the Facebook and TA reviews seemed obviously fake. Yelp contained stories of the manager talking to the children of guests at the vending machine in an incoherent way and asking 'if they'd seen Billy' and various other disturbing stories.
I looked into the manager, Wayne, and found his Facebook page. It was filled with references to Satan worship, group sex and demonic possession. The necklace he wore which I thought was a Star of David was actually a pentagram, as displayed in his collection on FB. He had photos of his dog that he claimed depicted demonic possession on his FB page, as well as photos of their satanic altar at the motel.
So, my conclusion was that TripAdvisor and Facebook are very, very bad at preventing false reviews compared to Yelp or Google.
It's unscrupulous, absolutely, but I imagine it's very hard (if not impossible) to prove who is or is not performing the gaming.
Low tech/low cost warfare against the tech marketing power houses always works.
After gaining some fame from that article, the author has continued his shenanigans: when asked for TV interviews he sent lookalikes of himself to be interviewed.