The reviews of the world’s dirtiest hotels are in, and only Max Bialystock, the character in The Producers who makes a shady living bringing big theatrical flops to Broadway, would welcome notices like these:
“Cradle of filth: The worst, worst, worst hotel in the world!” — Kimo-Sabe, Dubai.
“Slept in my clothes!” — Caznbri, Somerset.
“Made me think of my own grave.” — PersonBrighton, UK, Brighton.
Those are just a few excerpts from reader-generated reviews of various hotels in Britain, culled from the 2010 Dirtiest Hotels lists published recently by TripAdvisor.com, the online network of travel sites. TripAdvisor says it has reviews of more than 450,000 hotels around the world.
The “dirtiest hotels” lists, which TripAdvisor has heavily promoted for several years, always generate robust publicity. This year’s lists singled out the 10 “dirtiest” hotels in each of six regions — the US, Asia, Canada, France, Italy and Britain.
In Britain, particularly, this year’s list is causing a fury as “the hotel industry is growing increasingly concerned at the power wielded by Internet sites such as TripAdvisor,” according to the Independent newspaper there.
The newspaper reported last week that hotels throughout Europe were “seeking to persuade the European Union Commission to overhaul the rules governing Web site reviews to ensure that they have been posted by genuine guests and not by rivals or people simply out to cause mischief.”
In the US, hard-hitting online travel reviews cause a lot less commotion, even though TripAdvisor’s reviews of the “dirtiest” hotels in the US are just as blunt as the rest of the worldwide lists. (“Sleep in your car, not here!” warns LuckyDude, Chicago.)
Web sites using online reader-generated commentary are rewriting the rule book for travel reporting, and no site has as much impact as TripAdvisor, which is owned by Expedia and is one of the biggest online reader review sites. So it was a good time to talk with TripAdvisor’s chief executive, Stephen Kaufer.
The dirtiest hotels lists are a tiny part of what TripAdvisor does, of course. But Kaufer was happy to address the criticism.
“You bet, if you’re a hotel on that list, it is not a good sign for your business,” he said. “We have advertisers who call us up after they see one of their chain properties on the list and say, ‘Come on, I spent money with you advertising, and you put the property on the list?’ The sales guys tell them, ‘The editorial team looks at all the reviews; they look at what the guests say on the site — and one bad review does not get you on the list. But when it’s consistently ranked as a bad hotel by lots of people saying terrible things, hey, we are not shy.”’
“Please believe me,” he added, “we are careful about the lists, so a hotel isn’t named just because there are four bad reviews. We are dealing with someone’s reputation. It’s the ones that are consistently bad that make it — and I challenge any curious individual to check out one of these places and see whether they deserve to be on the list.”
How about the charge in Britain that lists and reviews can be manipulated by wily competitors or, as the Independent darkly put it, by unspecified others who are out to “cause mischief”?
“It’s damned hard to trick our system in a way that would affect the ratings, because we have the sheer volume of reviews to use for comparison,” Kaufer said. “Suspicious activity is caught in our filters before it makes it live to the site. And then we rely on the millions of people a day who are not shy about clicking on the link to report that they smell a rat.”
Outside the US, the online reviews are upending long-established systems of hotel reviewing, some regulated by governments. Even travel review warhorses, like printed travel guides, are bridling at the online competition.
On his blog, the long-established travel guidebook publisher Arthur Frommer, has, for example, pointedly noted the “allegations” that TripAdvisor reviews have been “manipulated and distorted by less-than-objective opinions.”
Frommer is also critical of another fast-growing hotel review site, Oyster.com, which has a small staff of journalists who write reviews that are profusely illustrated with photographs that are not always flattering. Oyster’s inspectors are hired from the ranks of young former “journalism students,” Frommer wrote dismissively.
We’ll hear more in future columns about this developing donnybrook in the world of travel reviewing. Is there any future for print travel guides, which are typically out of date before they hit store shelves?
In online travel reviewing, does the future belong to sites like TripAdvisor and IgoYougo, which are driven by Internet crowd sourcing, or to the likes of Oyster, which plans to expand its ranks of visually oriented, professionally trained staff reviewers?
Or are there market niches for them all, once the commotion settles?
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