Review forums growing
When it comes to hotel reviews, suddenly everyone’s a critic. And that can be a problem.
One citizen reviewer on Epinions.com complained that service at the deluxe Renaissance Mayflower in Washington sags on weekends, after business travelers have checked out.
Another wrote on Wheretostay.com that the grime in a guest room at SuperClubs Breezes in Montego Bay, Jamaica, was so thick that a message written on a glass window said: “Clean me, I’m dirty.”
With the increased prevalence of hotel-review sites that publish critiques by guests, any traveler with an urge to share his or her views on the quality of linens, the firmness of mattresses or other aspects of a place of lodging can be a critic.
“Hotel public relations people and professional writers have their ways of getting out their word on properties,” says Josh Feuerstein, vice president of hotels at Travelocity.com, one of the first sites to include user reviews. “This is the public’s chance to express its views on the quality of a place and the service it delivers.”
Until recently, critiques by guests were mostly a curiosity, the travel equivalent of reality TV. Now more travelers are using them for advice on where to stay – or avoid – and for sharing their own views on properties they have patronized.
Tripadvisor, the biggest and most frequently used site, includes 2.7 million user reviews of hotels worldwide. By Feuerstein’s account, the number of guest-written reviews on Travelocity doubled – to 50,000 – in the past year.
The popularity of user reviews has spawned a slew of new sites offering them. Besides Tripadvisor and Travelocity, the most widely used are Igougo.com, Hotelshark.com, Wheretostay.com, Epinions.com, Ricksteves.com, Expedia.com, Fodors.com and Zoomandgo.com. Each offers a slightly different format, focus or tone.
Travelers can find reviews for thousands of properties across the globe, ranging from the $595-a-night Four Seasons in New York to the $23-a-night Friends Hostel in Paris. Kayak.com, an online travel aggregator, includes with its hotel listings links to guest-written reviews from several Internet sites.
Besides the sites where users can post reviews, a handful offer those who log in the chance to post and answer questions about specific hotels. They include Hotelchatter.com, Flyertalk.com and Lonelyplanet.com‘s Thorn Tree.
As more and more vacationers regularly log on to research trips and make reservations, the appeal of user reviews is obvious. They offer up-to-date information, sometimes available within hours of a guest’s visit. Critiques posted on Travelocity and several other sites are removed after a year; the listings on hotels in many guidebooks can be a couple of years old.
But the biggest attraction is the raw candor. The writers often take a refreshingly undiplomatic approach, and most sites edit or censor the views lightly, if at all.
Some reviewers are well-traveled professionals who critique hotels – and other travel services – as an avocation.
Jim Rosenberg of Wausau, Wisc., is a public utility official who stays in hotels more than 40 nights a year. He has written reviews of dozens of properties for Tripadvisor and Igougo.
“I have often used reviews by other travelers for advice,” Rosenberg says. “And the results have almost always been good. I figure offering my own comments about hotels is a way of repaying my debtedness to other travelers.”
His write-up of the Holiday Inn St. Germain des Pres in Paris, published earlier this year on Igougo, typifies the no-nonsense approach many of the reviewers take: “It has a low to nonexistent charm factor that may leave you wondering whether you might have been better off going with one of the area’s many two- or three-star properties that would provide comparable or better accommodations at a lower rate.”
Others are even more blunt. “Rather depressing” is how Antoinette Gurney of San Diego described the Aston Kaanapali Shores on the Hawaiian island of Maui on Wheretostay.
It has “old decor and dark, echoing hallways,” she added. “We had to change rooms several times because of bad odors or faulty air conditioning.”
Like the hotels they cover, the user-review sites have their flaws, too. Among them:
“They are too often based on a single negative experience. What might have been a fluke incident – a frazzled desk clerk, dirty socks overlooked by housekeeping, a plate dropped by a room service attendant – is used as black mark against a hotel.
“Different reviews of a property on the same site are sometimes grossly inconsistent or contradictory. The Hotelshark entry on the Fountainebleau, a popular four-star property in Miami, contains two entries. “Delightful,” one says; the other warns, “Our mini-vacation turned out to be a nightmare at this so-called resort.”
“The reviewers’ credibility and motivation can be questionable. Since most sites do not require critics to post identifying information – only the Graffiti Wall at Ricksteves requires full names and contact information – it’s unclear who the reviewers are.
Travelocity requires user reviewers to register but not to include their contact information online. To hedge against hotel managers or their friends writing hyped reviews of properties, Expedia allows only those who book a hotel room through the site to write a review.
On Igougo, most reviews are written by registered members; many include names, contact information and even photos of the reviewers. Most Tripadvisor reviews list the writer’s home town but are otherwise anonymous.