Large proportion of TripAdvisor reviews suspicious, university researchers warn

rob-law

Rob Law, professor in Hotel and Tourism Technology Management at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

A “large and considerable proportion” of online hotel customer reviews on TripAdvisor may be unreliable or fake, and reviews for lower-tier hotels deserve a harder look, according to a study by Markus Schuckert and Rob Law of the School of Hotel and Tourism Management at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and a co-researcher.

The researchers looked at reviews on the travel search engine and found that 20 per cent of reviews showed considerable discrepancy between overall rating and the aggregate category rating, translating to over 0.5 score points.

TripAdvisor allows reviewers to leave two types of numerical ratings for hotels – one for overall rating, and separately, six specific scores for service, value, sleep quality, cleanliness, location and rooms.

According to the study, signs that piqued suspicion included two reviews for which the overall hotel rating was a perfect score of five but the six specific qualities were only rated one or two.

Comparing the ratings with the corresponding written comments, one of the reviews seemed to fit the perfect rating, suggesting that the category ratings were unrepresentative of the customer experience, whereas the other review seemed more consistent with an overall low rating, suggesting that the high overall rating was misleading.

The research also revealed that in general, higher-tier hotels had less of a gap in their ratings than lower class hotels. This could suggest that “the problem of suspicious online ratings” may be more serious among the lower-class hotels.

It remained unclear if discrepancies were caused by deliberate manipulation or by “perfunctory rating behaviour” but the researchers nevertheless urged online customers to “pay more attention to the rating gap” on TripAdvisor.

They also suggested that TripAdvisor provide a warning to reviewers who “may have made a mistake or may not be taking the rating seriously” if they try to post a review with ratings that differ by more than 0.5.

41,572 reviews across 185 hotels with star ratings of one through five were considered in the study.

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