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How TripAdvisor Changed Travel

theguardian.com

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Re: How TripAdvisor Changed Travel

#2

Post by dpeck »

Highlights the larger problem that reviews have become untrustworthy and overwhelming for all but the most gullible and most discerning. The middle is stuck in roughly the same place they’d be without any reviews at all.

Re: How TripAdvisor Changed Travel

#4

Post by Panoramix »

I do a lot of traveling. My experience improved dramatically when I stopped using TripAdvisor and similar apps. I just go with the flow. Talk to real people. Like a bunch of American tourists (insert any country here) would know what, say, authentic Thai food is supposed to taste like. It all comes down to a bunch of -at best- uninformed people ranking stuff, at worst fake reviewers, bots and scammers. Why would I want that?

The worst part is that now if I don't want to look at their stupid logo, it's not enough to uninstall the app. They are everywhere. Restaurants and hotels begging for you to rank them positively, lest you enrage the child gods and send their business into ruin. Beautifully serene temples disgraced by a 15 foot high real life Tripadvisor logo to commemorate that they made it into the top 10 that year. A temple going back more than one thousand years, with trees and rock and the shitty green and black TripAdvisor logo ruining everything. It made me very sad.

Re: How TripAdvisor Changed Travel

#5

Post by chadash »

I'm fed up with TripAdvisor, Yelp and similar review sites. Too many of the negative reviews are off topic and they bring down the overall ratings (similar issue for positive reviews as well... people tend to rate things they love or hate, but not things in the middle). For example, Amazon is loaded with one-star reviews from people complaining that they received counterfeit items. This has nothing to do with the product itself and everything to do with a supply chain issue at Amazon (and more so its 3rd party merchants). Similarly, on TripAdvisor and Yelp, I regularly see one star reviews from people who have a specific issue and don't review hotels/restaurants on their own terms. For example, if you are a health nut, you really aught to not post a review of a BBQ joint to complain about lack of healthy options. Family taking a vacation? Don't post reviews of a hotel in the financial district that caters to business travelers because you are upset that they lack good facilities for kids. I highly prefer professional reviewers who have a breadth of experience and also know to review movies on their own terms. That's why I find the aggregated professional movie reviews on Rotten Tomatoes more helpful than the crowd-sourced reviews on IMDB.

I think there's a solution that would help the problem a bit though. Have two tiers of reviewers. For example, on TripAdvisor, the first tier would include everyone, similar to what you have right now. Second tier would be an aggregated number by "gold" reviewers. To qualify, a gold reviewer would need to have:

- More than N number of reviews

- An individual review would only count if it was more than a minimum number of words

- Let users mark reviews as helpful or not helpful. A gold user will need to be above a threshold for percentage of helpful vs not helpful reviews, with a minimum number of helpful reviews.

Amazon already marks some reviewers as being, for example, a "top 1000 reviewer". What I'd like to see is for those top tier reviewers' reviews to be broken out as a separate score.

Re: How TripAdvisor Changed Travel

#7

Post by ryaniscool »

Really strange to see the negative comments. My favorite thing about TripAdvisor is that I feel empowered when I have a terrible experience at a venue. I can just go leave them a crappy review. It's very cathartic.

Also, I find most of the reviews to be generally accurate. It sounds like other people disagree with that which is strange. I've never used TripAdvisor to find a restaurant or a hotel and then felt like the reviews were faked.

Re: How TripAdvisor Changed Travel

#8

Post by kzzzznot »

ddelt wrote: post #3

I found this article to be very well written and brought up new facets of this problem that I hadn't previously considered. It was a great read.

The Guardian has fairly decent journalists working for them. I don't always agree with their politics, and the writing isn't as good as it was, say, 10 years ago but pieces like this show it is still of a high quality.

Re: How TripAdvisor Changed Travel

#10

Post by 4ad »

Panoramix wrote: post #4

I do a lot of traveling. My experience improved dramatically when I stopped using TripAdvisor and similar apps. I just go with the flow. Talk to real people. Like a bunch of American tourists (insert any country here) would know what, say, authentic Thai food is supposed to taste like. It all comes down to a bunch of -at best- uninformed people ranking stuff, at worst fake reviewers, bots and scammers. Why would I wa…

I agree that Tripadvisor is useless for restaurants, but how do you find/book hotels? In general hotels are more expensive when booked directly and not through an aggregator, however, how do you even find them without sites like Tripadvisor?
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