One Figaro article of August 23, 2014 reported on the pitfalls relating to online ratings and reviews for restaurateurs, hoteliers and suppliers of leisure activities of all kinds, relating in particular to unfair practices by competitors posting false negative reviews or customers using reviews as a bargaining tool on prices or services.

Even if the said rebellion of the traders concerned seems exaggerated, this phenomenon must absolutely stop! The interest of these opinions being that they come from real customers, who have consumed a service. The perfect culprit, TripAdvisor .

Rigged or falsified reviews, an easily recognizable practice

On the Internet, it is quite easy to recognize a rigged or falsified review. A few clues:

1. The date of registration, and/or the number of reviews posted. A profile with less than 5 reviews or registered very recently with a lot of reviews for example, and little information provided.
2. The way to write. If the article is not circumstantiated, with few details, then it is rather fishy. An article shouldn’t say it’s wrong, but it should say what’s wrong. Otherwise, the business cannot improve.

Watch out for spelling mistakes though. Their presence or absence gives no clue as to whether the review is real or not.

The opinion must relate to the main service of the établissement

The activity of a property can be diverse: a hotel can have a restaurant, a bar, a spa open to external customers, etc. And, potentially, he also receives people who are not customers: taxis, cars with drivers, participants in a meeting, etc.
This diversity of attendance means that reviews may sometimes not reflect the experience of the établissement ‘s primary customers.
This is why, in many cases, établissement must strive to separate their activities on review sites.

The reaction must be structural and must not lead to guerrilla warfare

The reaction of professionals to these pitfalls must be moderate. If, of course, they can respond to the opinions left by customers, they should not resort to specialized sites such as TripAdvisor Warning . These sites, with not really clear intentions, do not have very clear practices either, and remunerate false positive opinions.

In summary, there is no point in responding to stupidity with stupidity. If you perform well, the reviews will be mostly good, and there will be those few negative reviews posted by competitors.

However, there are two ways to transform the system in depth:

1. Check the relevance of reviews. Review controls are insufficient. It is however simple, for a human with a little training, to detect suspicious opinions, with the few criteria mentioned in my article. But that is obviously still expensive.
2. Only publish a person’s reviews when they have posted at least 5 or 10 reviews, 30% of which have been verified by a human, for example
3. Ask for proof of purchase. This is already implicitly the case on Booking.com for example, and it could be generalized to independent sites like TripAdvisor.

There is therefore no miracle solution, but some improvements to be implemented in the current systems so that the opinions are real and relevant.