You may have read this week that The Atlantic Hotel has won the accolade of top UK luxury hotel in 2006 on TripAdvisor. Congratulations to Paddy Burke and his colleagues out west - on top of the Michelin Star awarded to Ocean Restaurant this week, it's a great achievement for the hotel and of PR benefit both to the hotel & Jersey.
The success of TripAdvisor is well documented- 5 million reviews covering more than 220,000 hotels and attractions and more than 20 million unique visitors each month. There is no doubt that consumer-driven content sites or Web 2.0 as it is known in the techie world has taken over from the traditional hotel guides as the principle way in which on-line travel purchasers are choosing where to stay. Both the RAC & Les Routiers hotel guides have stopped publishing as result of consumers switching to websites for supposedly 'unbiased' reports.
Recently however, there has been quite a bit of negative publicity about these sites, with investigations showing that owners and their friends were publishing their own fake reviews in order to boost their hotel rating and position and even worse publishing damning reviews of competitor properties in order to drop them down the chart.
The Sunday Times conducted an undercover investigation in November which proved:
- 'Guests' who had never stayed at a hotel can boost or depress ratings by posting fake reviews
- Poorly rated establishments can lift their reputations from one to four stars in a matter of hours by posting fictional reviews
- Some establishments attempt to damage the reputations of rivals.
You can read the article in full on the Times website. Now I am not suggesting at all that this is common, but I am aware of a couple of establishments in Jersey which have posted their own reviews. Perhaps there's nothing wrong with this if you can get away with it, but it does mean that consumers cannot be 100% confident in the feedback.
Last week alongside the accolades for The Atlantic, TripAdvisor published their Top 10 dirtiest hotels in the UK - happily there were no Jersey entries! Personally, I have used the site a lot to plan trips & so far have not been disappointed. Anyone else had a good or bad experience of user-generated content sites?
