I just read a fantastic article about TripAdvisor where the writer pointed out some things that should have been immediately obvious, and lets a couple of obvious things go unsaid.
He points out first of all that TripAdvisors motto "Get the truth, then go" is far more simplistic than it should be.
The number of posted reviews, over 20 million (unqualified) can't be regarded as the truth. First, they're just opinions. Second, people are more likely to post bad reviews so in a mathematical universe they should heavily outweigh positive reviews. Third, when a review is filled with marketing buzz phrases including such as "meal portions were not excessive, which is great in the tropics" then you're probably being duped. (If you haven't heard of the Belkin pay for good reviews scam, have a look.)
TripAdvisor was a good idea but it doesn't work in practice. Like communism. How can we make it more honest and useful?
That is a very hard question to answer. One of our ideas is giving the users the ability to post their own pictures and video as reviews and then encouraging them to do so. There may be issues with pictures of staff for example but that is a giant legal quagmire we shall be entering shortly.
A company called Tripr.tv had an idea where users submit videos of themselves reviewing the hotels they stay in and then uploading them, and if a user books that hotel they get a cut of the commission which has the inherent problem of users only submitting good reveiws, why would they bother with bad ones?
It will be interesting to see how our site develops in comparison to these others.
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