Booking site paying for reviews – no hotel visit needed!

Like many travel agents, I have a love-hate relationship with travel review sites. In an ideal world, first-hand experience is best. But no one can see every hotel. So often agents have to turn to reviews.

The most unbiased reviews tend to be the paid services, like “StarService, or specialized sites like “Andrew Harper’s Hideaway Report”, which agents can subscribe to for hotel information. But these services are expensive, and don’t cover every hotel, especially in the lower price ranges or in smaller towns.

This means, as much as we might take the other sites with a grain of salt, sometimes it’s the only information out there. The difficulty is sifting through the various reviews when anyone can post. In general, most travelers post when they had a particularly good or bad experience. And people’s standards vary considerably. Especially when they have booked the hotel on say, Priceline, which might mean they got a great deal, or that they got the worst room in the place.

Plus another elephant in the room is the fact that some establishments solicit reviews, and offer discounts or free extras for those who write them. Which is very difficult to trace.

But a new site from “Online Travel Media, Ltd”, called bookingadvisor.com, is taking this to a whole new level. And unfortunately, we’re not talking about a high level. They are advertising for people to review hotels who have never been there.

As posted on a board for bloggers looking for paid week, and noted by Chris Elliott last week, the job posting offers to pay reviewers $10 a day for 30 reviews a month. (Apparently the site only accepts one review a day per person?)

And the following is a direct quote:

Basically, what you will have to do is write a review for some of the hotels listed on our website on a daily basis (one post/hotel review per day).
The review must be a combination of what other people are saying about the hotel on other websites and from the description of the hotel. It doesn’t have to be too long, no more then 500-600 words.

In other words, read a bunch of reviews and the hotel’s own promotion information, then put it together to make it sound good. No need to go within a thousand miles of the place.

Now admittedly the information given out by most hotels themselves sites isn’t unbiased either. Go to the any major hotel chain website and the property descriptions will include words like “deluxe, spacious rooms, newly renovated, luxurious,” etc. Hotel locations are always “convenient, near major attractions, or scenic.” No hotel says things like, “Low prices because our rooms are old,” or, “You really don’t want to be outside on your own at night.”

Review sites in theory, however, are supposed to be unbiased and give travelers more information. Unfortunately, when many sites have no way of policing their reviews, there are probably a lot of other potentially fake reviews out there.

If a journalist were to cover a sporting event or news story from reading other accounts of the event, they would be fired. In this case, they are being invited to be dishonest. And people wonder how the travel industry sometimes gets a bad reputation?

photo uploaded by link576 on flickr.com/creative commons

Tagged as: Hideaway Report, hotel reviews, paid reviews, Star Service, travel agents, Tripadvisors