Tuesday 15 May 2012

"Google Places Review Abuse" by TripAdvisorWatch

TripAdvisorWatch have written a blog post entitled "Google Places Review Abuse". We've reproduced the text below. (You can find the original piece here.)

We don't take issue with anything contained in the post - we do, however, encourage hotels to 'seek a solution'. Dialogue is that solution - to TripAdvisor and Google - hotels must engage with their clients before they're tempted to write any thing negative (and financially harmful) on any website.

"As TripAdvisor is the dominant ratings sytem for hotels and restaurants etc., I make no excuses for concentrating this blog on that website.
However, anyone in the travel and lodging business with a listing on Google Places should not have failed to notice that the search engine giant also has its own ratings system.  Normally some competition for TripAdvisor might be regarded as a “good thing” to encourage improvement – but unfortunately that is not the case here.
The Google system is woefully inadequate, with nothing to stop anyone from posting hundreds of fake reviews in a single day if they want to.  And I am not exaggerating.  Here is one example that came to my attention simply because my own Places listing was one of those reviewed by this anonymous reviewer – one of over 900 Google Places reviews this individual made in one day in June 2011

Google says its “mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”.  Then Google should do something about abuses like this if it wants its fledgling review system to be taken even remotely seriously.
And “Anonyme” needs a good kick up the ****."

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