Customer may not have written that online hotel review

By Liz Benston

Tuesday, June 22, 2010 | 2:01 a.m.

The rise of traveler-generated online reviews has forced hotel managers to contend with anonymous posts from angry or disappointed customers.

For people in the business of promoting Las Vegas hotels, it has also opened the door for sneak counterattacks in the form of bogus positive reviews created to boost their clients’ image among the traveling public.

Travel websites such as Tripadvisor and Expedia, as well as generic review-driven sites such as Yelp, are well aware of such abuse. That’s why they have developed methods that attempt to pinpoint illegitimate reviews from fake “customers” who are, in reality, promoting their employers or attacking competitors.

It’s important for the sites to try to keep as many of the bogus reviews off the site because reviews have become one of the most important deciding factors for travelers choosing a hotel, says Katie Deines, spokeswoman for the travel booking website Expedia.

That’s why Expedia allows customers to search for hotels according to how other travelers have rated them, not simply by the hotels’ official star ratings, which are mostly determined by a standard checklist of services offered such as room service, valet and amenities for business travelers.

Hotels rated highly by travelers, with four or five out of five stars, tend to attract more bookings than hotels, even those with high star ratings, that get mediocre or poor traveler reviews, Deines says.

Expedia allows only people who have booked trips through the site to post reviews, so that is believed to weed out many of the P.R. flacks and bogus negative reviewers. On top of that, the site employs a team of people who read all reviews before posting them online, removing ones that look suspicious, Deines says.

At another popular site, Tripadvisor, no purchase is required to post a review, however. The site does require reviewers to register first, but although they are asked to fill out a profile, many aren’t identified by name, nor do all contributors complete all the questions, such as age, gender and location, requested for the online profiles that appear with the reviews.

As a first line of defense, Tripadvisor employs a software algorithm that filters out illegitimate reviews, spokeswoman Amelie Hurst says. The algorithm is geared toward detecting abuse on a wide scale and won’t necessarily red-flag the odd positive or negative review, she says. She declined to elaborate, citing concerns about users attempting to game the system.

Tripadvisor users — about 34 million each month — also filter comments by alerting management to fake reviews, which are reviewed by the company and potentially removed, Hurst says. Hotels caught faking reviews can be penalized by being excluded from honors afforded highly ranked hotels and flagged with red badge icons for all to see.

In general, though, a bogus positive or negative review here or there is not going to make much of a difference because Tripadvisor users generally read dozens of reviews at once. “No single review is going to sway a traveler’s opinion,” Hurst says.

Another customer review site, Yelp, also employs a software program to help the site detect and remove problematic reviews. Business profiles also feature a link directing consumers to “filtered reviews” that Yelp believes are suspect.

Such reviews are typically posted by users who frequently engage with the site by posting comments, blogs or other information about themselves and their preferences, spokeswoman Stephanie Ichinose says.

Because most reviewers are heavy users of the site, the online community is self-policing, with users “investing a lot of time and energy sharing information about businesses and experiences they love” and taking pride in the legitimacy and value of the information presented, she says.

Businesses, which must register and verify their identities before engaging with consumers, are increasingly responding to Yelp reviews by posting public comments, Ichinose adds. They may also use the site to send reviewers private messages, in addition to uploading photos and posting offers and other info.

All three sites allow hotels to post public comments, either in response to specific reviews or generic information intended to promote the hotel.

Although Las Vegas hotels have quickly embraced social networking websites in recent years by launching Facebook and Twitter accounts to engage with customers, few local properties have crossed the communications barrier on travel websites by responding to traveler comments.

That’s a missed opportunity, says Mehmet Erdem, an associate professor at UNLV’s William F. Harrah College of Hotel Administration.

Monitoring and responding to customers, whether on property or online, is part of Service Recovery 101, Erdem says. The first step is to listen or read the complaint, the second is to empathize with the customer and tell him how you are able to fix the problem, and the third step is to fix it so it doesn’t happen again.

Review websites have grown in importance for hotel managers by offering valuable, even necessary feedback. The more reviews a property attracts, the more legitimate the feedback, Erdem adds.

Multiple research studies have shown that, in aggregate, traveler-generated hotel reviews posted online revealed ratings that were similar to those generated by professional marketing firms paid by hotels to survey travelers. On average, and over the course of hundreds of online reviews, the comments reveal core truths about the properties at issue, Erdem says.