Leave Trip Advisor Alone.

Hoteliers all over the UK are taking TripAdvisor to court over negative comments left about their hotels. I’m a big fan of trip advisor it aided us very much on a trip to America.

While I agree that there may be vested interests reviews posted both positive and negative, the overall result is a benefit for the consumer. If a hotel or restaurant has 3 bad reviews and 3000 good it’s a pretty safe bet, conversely a hotel with 500 bad reviews and 10 good is a simple no go. Not so the hoteliers say, bad reviews are affecting business. In a move that would make the Catholic Church proud, instead of aiming to better their service or deal with customers’ unrealistic expectations they’d rather sue somebody until the bad reviews go away.

What we are seeing here is consumerism go head to head with capitalism. While we the consumer would like to make well-informed decisions on these sorts of things leading to industry wide improvements. The Capitalist hotel owners think we should shut up and buy what they are willing to sell us.

I’ll be the first to admit having done some Search Engine Optimisation these review sites are open to abuse, but after you reach a critical mass of users the fraudulent entries are swamped by the real reviews. In most instances trip advisor has reached this point. Most people who are consumer smart enough to check these sites, are also smart enough to a) not be put off by a small number of bad reviews, and b) understand that they are open to abuse. So we take each review with a pinch of salt.

Here are some of my reviews on TripAdvisor and hoteliers you may like to see they are all positive. So there!!