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Fraudulent reviews on tripadvisor, twitter etc

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Comments

  • I recently chanced upon some obviously fake hotel reviews on booking.com (2 days apart, 10/10, clunky use of English, way to much sales-pitch info etc.).

    I have no axe to grind with the hotel - it may be the perfectly nice. It was just a case of the reviews being obviously fake to the point of being comical.

    I emailed booking.com and they responded to say no way they could have been fake as only guests who've booked to stay at a hotel can write reviews.

    So, is there such a think as a fake booking.com review??
  • The way I use TA is this.

    If there are only 1 or 2 reviews which are either very good or very poor and they are the only reviews ever posted by the TA users in question then I tend to ignore them as there is a reasonable possibility of them being fake.

    However, if there are dozens or hundreds of reviews which have been posted by people who have been TA members for a while and who have a record of reviewing hotels then I will generally take more notice.
    Even then I normally don't take much notice of reviews that are outside of the "average" score (eg, if there are a hundred reviews that give 3* or 4*, two that are 1* and two that are 5*, I will ignore the extreme ones and tend to believe the mid point reviews).
    I know that this isn't foolproof, but I've stayed in many TA reviewed hotels and motels and personally I've never been too disappointed or surprised.
  • Dave_C_2
    Dave_C_2 Posts: 1,827 Forumite
    edited 26 February 2013 at 2:59PM
    The way I use TA is this.

    If there are only 1 or 2 reviews which are either very good or very poor and they are the only reviews ever posted by the TA users in question then I tend to ignore them as there is a reasonable possibility of them being fake.

    However, if there are dozens or hundreds of reviews which have been posted by people who have been TA members for a while and who have a record of reviewing hotels then I will generally take more notice.
    Even then I normally don't take much notice of reviews that are outside of the "average" score (eg, if there are a hundred reviews that give 3* or 4*, two that are 1* and two that are 5*, I will ignore the extreme ones and tend to believe the mid point reviews).
    I know that this isn't foolproof, but I've stayed in many TA reviewed hotels and motels and personally I've never been too disappointed or surprised.

    +1 for this. I also look at the shape of the graph of reviews

    I would look closely at this hotel:
    Excellent...#########
    Very good ########
    Average ....####
    Poor .........#
    Terrible ...../

    But not this one:
    Excellent.../
    Very good #
    Average ....####
    Poor .........#######
    Terrible ......#########

    I'm also wary of reviews where they say "Can't get proper English food the meat is always in some horrible sauce" :)

    Dave
  • antrobus wrote: »
    S2 Fraud Act 2006, Fraud by false representation

    Do you seriously believe that the DPP are going to sanction prosecutions for misleading reviews on American websites, when they are currently desperately attempting to row back the recent flood of "someone said something nasty on Twitter" car crashes?
  • goonarmy
    goonarmy Posts: 1,006 Forumite
    Do you seriously believe that the DPP are going to sanction prosecutions for misleading reviews on American websites, when they are currently desperately attempting to row back the recent flood of "someone said something nasty on Twitter" car crashes?
    and why not????:rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:
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