How can you tell which TripAdvisor reviews to trust ?

This article written by Laura Bly allows us to understand the impact of TripAdvisor on the hoteliers and on the online travel market.
This article explains how TripAdvisor can have positive and very negative impacts on different hotels and how it can affect a business.

TripAdvisor is still one of the first travel website with an amazing number of people who visiting the site everyday. With 5 million visitors a day and 40 million reviews and opinions in 19 languages, TripAdvisor is a veritable tool for the travellers and a large window to communicate for the hoteliers. This website is more than important for each hotelier who does not want to see his approval rating decrease because of negative reviews or (worse) because of fake reviews. So, how can we trust one when we can read so many everyday ?

After reading the article, many questions can be asked:
- How hoteliers can protect themselves to million reviews posted everyday seen and read by million people ? Any hotels could be in a position to give a response to any travellers who posted a negative review in order to prove that the hotelier is concern about his problem and in order to show that the hotelier is capable to take responsabilities for his mistake. It will also allow the other customers, that he had or that he will have, that the hotelier try to solve the problem and try to find different solutions. The hoteliers who can reply to the disappointed customers show that they are responsible and it is a first proof that the others reviews regarding the hotel can be trust.

- How can we recognise fake reviews regarding hotels ? A lot of suspicions from both hotels and their guests have been made in order to show that TripAdvisor can have some limits when you have to trust or not each review. Fake negative reveiws can be made to attack the reputation of people and businesses but fake positive reviews can also be made to dupe customers and attract them.
We will never be sure of the good quality of the review  but the customers have to be aware and learn how to look for other reviews on other websites such as virtualtourist.com or expedia.com and so on. After consulting many reviews, then customers can confirm the first source and make their own opinion thanks to a large network of trravellers.

- How also to "educate" the Internet users to not judge the first negative comment in order to give a chance to the hotelier to proove that his hotel is not "so negative" ?
The article makes a good point by showing that the cultural and geographic differences is an important factor to consider when the customers read reviews online. For instance, an Indian will never have the same expectations regarding the service, the size of the room...than an European. So when an European traveller read a review made by an Indian, he has to understand that the culture is different and the expectations different.

To conclude, it is important to look for many proofs before to make an opinion on hotels and to trust negative or positive reviews. If the review is not trustable, it can definitely destroy the reputation of the hotelier and can also affect the holiday of a future customer. One of the other impact of this article is to understand how fast can go an information and the hoteliers have to be aware of this effective tool.

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