As a previous business owner (I had a small hotel, a bar, and a restaurant) I am very aware of how important it is to be highly ranked on TripAdvisor. It was always a very frustrating aspect of my job because people don't even look around with their senses anymore. I am guilty of it too, walking down the road looking at my phone in order to get somewhere and not even taking in my surroundings thereby not actually learning anything about the area I am in.
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This means that unless you get on things like TripAdvisor or Yelp or whatever happens to be popular in your particular region, you will experience great difficulty in obtaining customers. Seems pretty obvious. However, the problem I have with this entire process is how easy it is to manipulate their system. There are some pretty funny stories out there about how people worked to make non-existent businesses in their communities the "Number one restaurant" the most famous one being the restaurant in London whose pictures weren't even actually food.
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However, through hype and a load of fake reviews they gradually worked their way to number one in all of London. They even answer the phone when people would call for reservations and simply tell everyone they don't have an opening until next year or something like that. It's a very interesting story and you can hear it all in this clip.
That is the most famous one, but I want to talk about my personal experience: We were on TA and had been for years. We won the coveted "certificate of excellence" and maintains a 4-star rating for 7 years. A new, giant hostel with bar and restaurant opened up next door to my well-established place and within 2 weeks they had 10 times as many reviews as we did. How is this possible? It isn't - they cheated. To make matters worse all of the established businesses in the immediate area started getting hit with a rush of 1-star reviews from people that clearly had never even been there. It wasn't just me, it was everyone.
Then one day I was contacted by a service center in India advertising that they can help my TA rating as they have over ten thousand accounts with TA and you don't pay until the 5-star reviews post and I can also pay to tarnish the name of some other competing business with 1-star reviews. So there you have it, not necessarily this specific company, but one like it was responsible for the online success of my neighbor business.
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Through a series of complaints that I organized with all the surrounding businesses we were able to get a lot of the negative reviews for our businesses removed because the company made some errors by having the same account make negative reviews of multiple lodging establishments and they used a copy/paste script rather than doing original content. A lot of the 1-star reviews were unresolved though and they ended up staying on our listings and of course negatively impacting our respective businesses.
I don't really use TripAdvisor because I know how easily manipulated their system is. There are some very clever companies out there that can make or break your business as far as that platform is concerned. I hope that #tasteem can expand to other countries but at the moment they seem to be only operating in Korea. A South-African friend of mine is currently working on an app that requires you to be within range of a dongle of sorts in order to write a review and I suppose that would eliminate a lot of the "call center" fakes. They are having trouble raising the money because obviously the technology isn't free.
I suppose I am writing this because of my experience at the very highly rated French Restaurant last night that turned out to be an average place to eat.
I think if you insist on using TripAdvisor I would at least take the following steps to get to the facts
- Ignore the 1 and 5-star reveiws
- look for the "trusted reviewers" (these people are upvoted by the community and have a lot of "helpful" votes on their reviews
- do a google advanced search on any review to see if it is a copy/paste (this is very easy to do)