Trip Advisor - Real or Fake?

Aloha Kakou:

There have been a number of articles in the news lately about TripAdvisor, the site where hotel and restaurant reviews are allegedly written by the guests who have actually experienced the hotel or restaurant.

I say "allegedly" as these articles (see links below) would have you believe that those TripAdvisor reviews may be the result of either puffery by the venue itself or by attacks from competitors.

For the record, we here at the Outrigger Maui Eldorado do not write positive reviews about our property; our reviews are written by the guests themselves with no help, coaxing or cajoling from us. Similarly, we do not stoop to writing negative reviews of our competitors.

Should you trust TripAdvisor? Perhaps if you throw out the most glowing and the most egregious reviews, you may find a happy medium. From my perspective as a hotel general manager, TripAdvisor's lack of understanding of the vacation rental condominium business model makes it difficult to remove non-rental reviews which appear under the Outrigger name from time to time. While I personally do not take TripAdvisor seriously, enough potential guests apparently do. I review all new entries under our name to make sure that they are accurate and when they're not, I work to get them removed, with varying degrees of success. I do find that persistence pays off, though, and if at first I don't succeed, I try, try again.


http://www.tripso.com/today/new-tripadvisor-whistleblower-claims-some-reviews-are-totally-fraudulent/
http://travelweekly.texterity.com/travelweekly/20090622/
http://www.elliott.org/blog/does-tripadvisor-hotel-manipulation-scandal-render-the-site-completely-useless/