A feast of hotel guest reviews, but watch out for bad apples

YOU too can be a travel writer, thanks to a growing number of travel websites. Now the average traveler can post thoughts on and reviews of hotels on sites that draw millions of readers.

Travel sites increasingly are soliciting user reviews of hotels where -- at least purportedly -- amateur reviewers have stayed.

The largest of the sites and perhaps the granddaddy of them all, TripAdvisor (www.tripadvisor.com), reports it has about 18 million visitors a month and garners more than 2.6 million reviews.

Travelocity has had such reviews since 2000 and Yahoo Travel (www.travel.yahoo.com) and Expedia (www.expedia.com) added them to their hotel listings in 2004. Hotels.com (www.hotels.com) is planning to add them in the coming months. (Expedia, TripAdvisor and Hotels.com are owned by the same parent company, Expedia Inc.)

But as with any user-generated Web content, consumers need to be wary of potential abuses.

“There is a lot of room for fraud” on sites that post anonymous reviews, said J.R. Johnson, co-founder and chief executive of VirtualTourist (www.virtualtourist.com), an online community of travelers who share, among other things, reviews of hotels.

The profiles of its more than 600,000 members who submit reviews are posted online.

“Where we differentiate ourselves is you are able to read up on the author who actually wrote the reviews,” Johnson said.

On sites that allow anonymous reviews, industry experts say, hotels may pay people to generate positive reviews of their property or write reviews slamming competitors.

Furthermore, there is no guarantee that the writer even stayed at a particular property. (Expedia is one site that verifies that the writer stayed at the property.) Reviewers with all sorts of mischief in mind can use the forum to their own purposes, which can be less than honorable.

I read user reviews at six websites for the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas, which is consistently ranked among the top Vegas hotels.

Two reviews at TripAdvisor jumped out at me. They were written within a week of each other, and both discussed how important it is to “tip big” when staying at the Bellagio.

One even said that bell staff members muttered unkind remarks about the amount of the tips.

A difference of opinion

THIS was inconsistent with the other reviews and with my own two stays at the Bellagio. During my visits, staff members were professional and appropriately thankful for tips of any size.

It’s unclear what motivated these postings; because the reviewers are anonymous, there’s no way to tell. It could even be the staff trying to goad visitors into tipping more or someone simply with a tip-chip on his shoulder.

Having other reviews to weigh them against certainly helps paint a more accurate -- and usually, balanced -- picture.

“TripAdvisor’s greatest strength is you get enough of a range of opinions [that] you’re really going to get a better feeling for a property,” said Brooke Ferencsik, a TripAdvisor spokesman.

Indeed, TripAdvisor lists in chronological order nearly 500 reviews just for the Bellagio.

IgoUgo (www.igougo.com) takes a different approach. Its focus, like VirtualTourist, is to build communities of travelers rather than just list one-off reviews of hotel properties.

Its postings are edited, and the quality of the review is rated.

“We think it is important to encourage quality over quantity,” said Jim Donnelly, the founder of IgoUgo, which was bought in February by Travelocity parent company Sabre.

“You are able to see the person behind the review.... One person’s review taken out of context means nothing.”

When I looked at IgoUgo’s reviews of the Bellagio, the highest-rated review (it’s the review’s content, not the hotel, that’s being rated) was more than 5 years old. And trying to read some of the 14 other reviews required lots of extra key strokes just to navigate them.

“There are things about the site that we are always trying to improve,” Donnelly said.

I find user reviews of hotels helpful and, in many cases, fun to read, but, like all such reviews, they should be viewed with an eye that’s at least as critical as the one you cast at your hotel room.

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Contact James Gilden at www.theinternettraveler.com.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Who’s who on the Web

*--* Website Reviewers vetted? Anonymous? Number of Bellagio rating* hotel reviews Expedia Yes Yes 71,000 4.5 IgoUgo No No 35,000 none Travelocity No Yes 35,000 4 TripAdvisor No Yes 2,646,000** 4 VirtualTourist No No 97,000 4.5 Yahoo Travel No Yes 150,000 4.5

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*5 is maximum rating

**Does not break out from other reviews, such as restaurant.