How much can we trust online reviews?
One of the great things about Amazon and ebuyer (and many other stores) is the reviews available to those looking for real world information about a product. Magazines get products to try out then return, but the item is only in their possession for a short amount of time, and these products are supplied specifically for testing by journalists.
The Top Gear Survey is built on this premise. They get a car and drive it round some corners quickly, but what’s it actually like day to day? And what are the dealers like? This scenario actually works out quite well - a motoring journalist will know what to look for and can give you some information on the stats, and the owner can complement this with how it performs after a few months, how it copes in everything the weather has to throw at it and so on.
A few years ago I read a piece about reviews on Amazon. The journalist had looked up a number of books, DVDs and other items on sites like Amazon and found many had consumer reviews before they’d even gone on the market. After that I wondered if the product I was looking at on a site had been reviewed by staff in an effort to shift stock, or whether it was a genuine review. Now with so many forums and tools like Technorati and Google Blog Search, it’s become a bit easier to cast a wider net when looking for opinions.
Simon Calder (apparently “the man who pays his way”) is the travel editor for the Independent. Previously on Radio 2 at an hour I was always asleep, he’s moved up to Mo Dutta’s show between 6am and 8am on Saturday and I have to say I consistently enjoy Simon’s discussions on everything travel. The reporting is always straight and honest, with nothing unnecessary thrown in.
This week in the Independent, Simon talks about trusting the reviews on travel websites, following news from Holiday Which? that the reviews might not be as honest as you think and posing a question over the tactics some hoteliers might go to for good write up. My immediate thoughts were around the target audience of these sites and a magazine such as Holiday Which? who conducted the research.
In defense of the sites, magazines might have one or more reviewers in a particular time scale. Considering the gap between the visit and getting the magazine through peoples doors, the travel sites might do better on recent information if the hotel was suffering a staff shortage, or building work. Another benefit the sites have is seeing “I took my grand children to the hotel…” to “After my girlfriend and I got our A level results…”. In looking for accommodation recently I made extensive use of TripAdvisor, starting off by looking up the hotels Expedia came back with, then used TripAdvisor’s ratings to find prices for hotels visitors had rated highly.
After a while I noticed myself ignoring the 4 and 5 star reviews and hunting out the bad ones. Now I think about it, I suppose I justify that approach by saying that for £80 the hotel should to be nice, with a decent room and good staff . There were some genuine bad stories - one hotel I looked at had rooms backing on to a courtyard which was extremely noisy with drinkers and air conditioning units at 2am. Get a room at the front and the views might be amazing and “the traffic was relatively quiet”. Some criticisms of another hotel might revolve around something like room size and “only a foot and a half around the bed”. Walking around the bed is something I can do at home - I can live with that for a few days.
Simon finishes the article by saying “Even so, anyone considering a large investment like a holiday, who relies exclusively on the opinions of unidentifiable individuals, would be mad not to consult friends, family, guidebooks and a good travel agent.”
Having not consulted any of those four, I hope the reviews online turn out to be right. I’ll post my own when I get back next week. =)
If you’re interested in my persuits whilst I’m away, you can follow me on my Tumblelog at jmsbrrg.com and see photos on my flickr account.
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