Bad reviews of holidays will always dominate travel websites

I was most interested to read Mr Madeley’s article about fake reviews which plague such sites as TripAdvisor.

I used to contribute to TripAdvisor and I also used it for myself to seek out good hotels, as a regular traveller, having visited over 40 different countries in the last 25 years for my own training business.

I then gave it all up as, eventually, it all seemed so pointless. So subjective from both the writer’s and the reader’s perspective, Not because of fake reviews, but because of human psychology. The new site can never address such a problem.

The writing element. If you find a really good hotel, at a particular destination, you may prefer to keep it to yourself. You do not even review it. Otherwise very good or OK, or ‘we enjoyed it’ sort of reviews just don’t get written, too much trouble. If its ‘OK’, then why bother? No review is written.

However, if you have a bad experience, revenge dictates that you will write a bad review as some sort of ‘punishment’ for the offending establishment.

So, good reviews don’t warrant the trouble of writing them, bad reviews will always dominate by virtue of the “revenge” factor. The balance is likely to be negative.

Then we come to the reading element. So, you see a hotel on one of the search engines for your destination. What are you going to look at first, the good reviews? No. Human psychology and curiosity dictates that you will look at all the really bad reports first. I am sure most of us do this even if to say, “that’s simply rubbish”. But our curiosity still dictates that we look at the worst reviews first. Hopefully some sort of common sense then takes over and a good establishment with the odd poor performance can then be in the frame. Not necessarily though.

This new website, does not and cannot ever address such factors. No web site ever can.

Peter Cartledge, Tetchill

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