Two Sunday papers carried stories about hotel review sites last weekend, reporting their shock and horror that it is possible to add a review for a hotel you’ve never been to and even hotel owners post reviews of their own hotels!

You can imagine how shocked we were, why hadn’t it ever been pointed out before! What would the great British public think if they found out? HW Headquarters was awash with a wave of cynicism and suspicion.

OK, maybe not. Do they really think this is news? Welcome to the triumphant era of Web 2.0, much lauded in the press, met with a “meh“ by people who actually design and run websites.  UGC (User-Generated Content), there I said it, another lovely buzz-word. Do they expect us to believe that people who read reviews on sites like ours can’t sort the wheat from the chaff? When we moderate submitted reviews, some are easy to spot as fakes, others you might give the benefit of the doubt, but even to the untrained eye, a shining review on a page of bad ones….elementry my dear Watson. The power we must hold where every written word is absorbed without question or thought? Hmm.

The Sunday Times actually carried two stories written by the same journalists. The one with the scoop contained a quote from  an Adam Raphael, co-editor of “The Good Hotel Guide” (that’s an actual book),
“Online sites are like a lucky dip. You may be lucky and you may find someone of reasonable judgment. On the other hand, you may have someone who is in the pocket of some hotel or restaurant. It really is a swamp”

In the other article, cryptically titled “Glowing online reviews by hotels and restaurants dupe customers”,  we hear that traditional publishers of hotel guides are finding the market a bit difficult, what with this new internet fangly thing. No conflict of interest there then.

The Scotsman also carried a similar article focusing on a Scottish hotelier who had been posting reviews of his own hotel online. He then apparently admitted it to the world, and the world – well two Sunday papers – came to listen. Now that’s pretty clever PR. Hats off to the guy, if you’re ever driving round Loch Ness drop into the Drumnadrochit Hotel and ask for David Bremner, assuming he’s finished his marketing seminar for the day.

Well I feel much better getting that out of my system. Off now to rewrite the Ten Commandments and stick them on our homepage.
1) Thou shalt not take Google’s name in vain…
…

Bookmark to: