Pedro Szeleky

With internet and social media replacing so much face to face talk our reliance has moved to online communities for information – information that can not always be verified as being accurate.

Honesty and Trust

For example, Trip Advisor are no longer the honest or trusted trip review site.

A friend told me about a recent experience at accomodation that received overwhelmingly positive reviews on Trip Advisor but turned out very different in his experience.

Many Trip Advisor users are finding that their negative reviews are not getting published and this is not an isolated experience.  

Trip Advisor claims to be proactive in taking down fake reviews.   There is a conflict of interest on the part of Trip Advisor because they receive money from hotels and favourable reviews earn money for hotels.  An alternative to Trip Advisor, TripExpert.com, contains verified expert reviews.  Unfortunately, experts don’t visit every corner of the globe…yet.

Trip Advisor is not the only site that has predominantly positive reviews. Amazon, wotif and eBay all have a suspiciously high number of satisfied customers.

Providing a right of reply

The exception to this positive-review-avalanche is Product Review. Product Review gives businesses the chance to respond to negative reviews and so acts as a quasi-mediator.  The result is that the negative reviews outnumber the positive reviews on Product Review.

User forums

We used to learn about places and products by talking to people, the closest way we can get this in the online world is user forums.