Before my trip to Vietnam I did not use TripAdvisor actively because of several reasons. I found it a commercialized platform with a lot of commuted reactions. It had a lack of authenticity and local preferences and opinions. The best restaurants in my town, for example where not even in the top 5. People would only write a review when the experience was either very good or very bad (a 1 or 5 star rating), which will make the overall ranking less representative. Besides that, it is hard for travellers to make a comparison, because a lot of travellers do not have a basis. Finally, not all people review and some kinds of people are more likely to post reviews than others, which also make it a less valuable review.
However, while traveling in an Asian country, I found it sometimes difficult to choose the best restaurant, tour or accommodation, because a lack of information. There are tons of touring organizations offering the same package, tons of restaurants having the same “best local” dishes and tons of accommodations ensuring you the best sleeping place. I used my lonely planet a lot and also asked local people for advise, but I was looking for more opinions. You really want to make sure that you don’t miss the best spots, so therefore I started using TripAdvisor to gather more information. I spotted the TripAdvisor signs literally everywhere in Vietnam and noticed that businesses are getting more and more dependent of the reviews and ratings. People were bagging me to write a positive review on TripAdvisor and mentioning their name would be even better. After three days I wanted to know why these reviews were so important to the employees. People were not checking TripAdvisor that much, right? Nope, I was absolutely wrong.
TripAdvisor is the worlds largest travel community with more than 60 million unique monthly visitors and over 75 million reviews and opinions. Customer reviews have been increasingly received the attention from various stakeholders (Globalbizresearch, 2015). One of the Easyrider guides tour told me that employees receive bonuses and evaluations based on TripAdvisor reviews. If the customers did not write a comment, it was expected that the customers did not have a great experience, and thus also had a negative impact on evaluations. Bosses were checking the reviews on a daily basis. I started to realize how much power TripAdvisor created. According to the independent study of PR (2012), 87% of users agree that TripAdvisor hotel reviews help them feel more confident in their booking decisions with the fact that 98% of respondents have found TripAdvisor reviews to be accurate of the actual experience while 53 % of respondents do not book a hotel that does not have any reviews on the sites. Eventually hotels are investing more time and dollars on managing the quantity, quality and location of online reviews, with particular attention paid to TripAdvisor (Thales and Leora, 2013:1). But is this what we want? Do you think that TripAdvisor is gaining more and more power? Is this either positive or negative?
Sources:
Globalbizresearch.org. Global Review of Research in Tourism, Hospitality and Leisure Management, “An Online International Research Journal (ISSN: 2311-3189)”, Vol: 1 Issue: 2, 2015.
PR, N., 2012, Survey Finds Half of TripAdvisor Users Will Not Book a Hotel that Has No Reviews, PR Newswire US.
Thales, T., and Leora, K., 2013, Managing Online Reviews on TripAdvisor. Harvard Business School
