Articles tagged “reviews”

It doesn't matter if a luxury hotel is based in New York City, Caracas, or Dubai. A strong social presence is needed to attract new guests and engage loyal customers, all of whom expect mobile updates and content from their preferred brands.

Many reputation management firms have made a living out of criticizing Yelp and TripAdvisor, and some of them have crossed the line and gotten into the fake-review writing business themselves. There are reputation management firms with integrity out there, but these 19 companies are not among them.

Some hotels see TripAdvisor as an adversary, and that's especially true of those that felt the wrath of negative reviews. In recent years, TripAdvisor has worked closer with hotels, or perhaps hotels have just come to accept founder Steve Kaufer's underlying message to the industry: "Adapt or die."

It's sensible that guests are happier when they've chosen a hotel based on quality and service instead of price. Hotels across the board should be cautious of following the trend towards service automation.

Axing the staff doesn't bode particularly well for a sale of Oyster.com, which many people said from its beginnings didn't have a viable business model. A expensive experiment, with Oyster's professionally written reviews taking precedence over hotels' marketing drivel, has all come to this.

Oyster has great content, but will potential buyers, such as media companies or hotel sites, really be brave enough to accommodate a business that bills itself as "The Hotel Tell-All?" Many will shy away from this candor because they don't want to offend hotel partners. That being said, critics said from day one that the Oyster's premise of professional reviews was unsustainable, and so far that is turning out to be true.

Hotels have long lived or died by professional ratings, and now they realize that TripAdvisor's user-generated content is just as important. When hotels are doing things right, the two reinforce one another.

There is no middle ground here: either you think this is douchebaggery taken to new level or you're one.

With millions of hotel reviews written by travelers, TripAdvisor has a wealth of information about choosing a place to stay, but you have to know what to look for in the reviews and what to discard.