Business travelers like Michelle Madhok used to consider online hotel reviews a reliable reference.
Whenever she traveled to an unfamiliar city, Madhok said, she clicked on sites like TripAdvisor.com or IgoUgo.com, where she found thousands of ratings written by real guests.
Or so she thought.
Madhok, the president of the Internet shopping site Shefinds.com, said she was now becoming increasingly skeptical of what she saw online. "I read reviews of hotels that I've stayed at," she said. "And they're just wrong. I wonder if they've really stayed at the hotel."
On a recent visit to a spa in New York, she says, her doubts turned to disbelief: The resort was discreetly offering a free reflexology treatment to customers who posted a positive review of the establishment on Citysearch.com. "It was very troubling," she said.
As Web sites that publish guest hotel reviews become more influential, some hotels -- from bed-and-breakfasts to large resorts -- are going to greater lengths to ensure that their properties are rated highly. Their efforts, analysts say, range from encouraging guests to write flattering reviews to, in extreme cases, submitting bogus recommendations to Web sites.
The hotels justify their actions, the analysts say, as a counterweight to out-of-context rants by disgruntled guests, both sides are exploiting a new technology that lacks the safeguards of the traditional travel guidebooks, which are written by professional writers and edited for accuracy.
It was not always so. In the early days of hotel review sites on the Web, the Internet was a less diverse place and the postings generally came from like-minded travelers, the experts say. But as more and more people are using the Internet to make travel decisions, there are more incentives, and opportunities, to manipulate reviews.
The major hotel chains deny that they try to influence online reviews in any way. But publishers at the most popular review Web sites say they have been inundated by fraudulent posts and have had to develop numerous measures to protect travelers.
Analysts and Web site operators say they fear that the effort is a losing battle. "Most sites can't catch a fake review," said Stanley Roberts, the chief executive of We8there.com, a lodging and dining review site.
Even so, Roberts says he reads every review before it is posted -- a laborious process that relies on instinct and experience. Still, he said, "I'm never sure if a fake is going to make it through."
The relentless efforts by hotels to influence their online ratings have made some review sites suspicious, if not paranoid. "We assume that every review we get is bogus and it is bogus until proven otherwise," said Kenneth Marshall, who publishes HotelShark.com, a small hotel review site "We have to look for a reason to publish it." Indeed, more than half the reviews he receives do not make the cut, he said. As a result, only about 1,200 hotels are reviewed on his site.
IgoUgo.com, another ratings site, takes a different approach to ferreting out fraudulent write-ups. The guest commentaries it publishes are put into context, with detailed information about each reviewer, "so you can see exactly who is writing the review and if that person has similar travel needs to yourself," said Jim Donnelly, the site's vice president for marketing.
IgoUgo counts about 670 active business travelers in its membership. Their postings are also monitored by editors as an extra precaution.
TripAdvisor, which is owned by Expedia, is perhaps the best known of the hotel ratings sites and proclaims it is the largest, with more than 3 million reader reviews. It is so concerned with review fraud that it hired Reed Meyer to create a fraud detection algorithm to sniff out suspect reviews. Meyer would not disclose how the program worked because he did not want to tip off hotels on how to circumvent it. Nor will he say how many reviews have been weeded out by the application.
Christine Petersen, TripAdvisor's senior vice president for marketing, said, "Hotels periodically try to get around the system." In one memorable case, an Italian hotelier offered the site a bottle of Limoncello di Capri liqueur if the site would remove a poor review of his property. The site declined.
"If a hotel is caught trying to influence the process, they're put on a watch list," she said. "That influences their ranking and is a huge black mark against them."
Hotel executives agree that the stakes are high in the ratings game, especially when it comes to business travelers, but they maintain that their efforts to influence the process are legitimate.
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