Posted on October 16, 2009 by Fiona Hilliard

Such is TripAdvisor’s popularity that for many holidaymakers, it’s their second port of call when booking a trip, (the travel site being the first).  But you’ve got to wonder – who actually reviews TripAdvisor? How accurate are their reviews and how many are in fact written by hotels and travel companies themselves?

Feeling compelled to investigate, I took the time out to trawl through the site’s hotel review posts, and began to see a pattern emerging.

Firstly, I noticed that when it comes to accommodation in Europe, it is Americans who write the greatest number of negative posts.  These are usually entitled:  “The Room Was Small”.  The reviewer then launches into a blow-by-blow account of how many lumps they found in their scrambled eggs, why they couldn’t sleep because the bedroom lamps weren’t symmetrical and perhaps strangest of all, the exact measurements of the bathroom. I mean, do these people actually bring a tape measure on their holidays???  Then again, all these trivial details could very well be deal-breakers…if you’re neurotic and you suffer from OCD.

Anyway, being American tourists, you can kind of take it for granted that they’re probably only used to super-sized beds, bathrooms and well, breakfasts.

Next I came across a plethora of annoyingly gushing, (fabricated) reviews – you’ll spot these by their vagueness.  Somewhere a hotel manager has been wracking his brains about how he’s going to counterbalance an attack on his small, asymmetrically furnished rooms and decides to play fiction writer for the day.  He awards the hotel five out of five (of course) and will call the review something like “Fantastic Experience, Will Definitely Be Returning.”  He never misses out on an opportunity to commend the wonderful staff or manager either.

Finally, I became aware of the dirtiest tactic of all – the competitor’s post.  This is the hotel across the road that is feeling the pinch of the recession.  They’ll go on TripAdvisor and rustle up something along the lines of: “So Bad I Had to Book  Another Hotel”. It’s even better for them if they find that their post follows the American’s “The Room Was Small” review.   You’ll notice that the competitor’s review will contain minimal information about the actual hotel they’re supposed to be scathing about.  Instead they’ll talk about their delight in finding a “cheaper, more spacious hotel located just across the street”, where the staff “couldn’t do enough”.

That’s not to say that TripAdvisor doesn’t have its merits.  There have been plenty of times when I’ve referred to TripAdvisor just before handing over my credit card details to a “centrally located hotel”, only to find a barrage of complaints about how far the hotel was from the main attractions, restaurants and bars. So the site does have its uses, you just have to wade through quite a bit of drivel to get there.