www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... CMP=twt_gu Interesting reading

www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... CMP=twt_gu Interesting reading

There's a lot of truth in that, especially the bit about restaurant and hotel reviews and sites like TripAdvisor - I mean, does anyone actually take anything they read on TripAdvisor as gospel ?

Each year when I book hotels for our little bike ride sojourn I often don't have a choice in where to place a dozen males who need food and beer after 40 or 50 miles of bike riding, so I just pick the nearest town and find any hotel with six bedrooms going free - its harder than you think when the whole point of the ride is to get away from civilisation.

Without fail, every time I have done this I have afterwards gone to TripAdvisor to see what the comments are like and without fail everyone describes the places as horrible, overpriced, dirty, rude staff, etc etc etc.

All anonymously of course, although not so anonymous to TripAdvisor who rely on miserable s to promote their site to advertisers.

Without fail every hotel that we have stayed in has been fine, maybe not 5 star fine so that you'd take your wife on a luxury weekend break, but sub £40 fine so that its got a bed, hot shower, food and beer and thats what we expected when we booked it, fine.

And on every occasion I take time out to write a review which points out to the moaning s that we found it very acceptable for what we booked and what we expected for the price and that maybe if they expected room service and a choice of fine wines they should have dipped their hand a little deeper in their stingy wallets.

my mates wife works for one of yorks top hotels. they got some awful reviews and it it was one of there rival hotels!!!!

i use trip advisor when booking holidays and find its useful. you always got complaints but if 85% think its good you can usually take it as a decent hotel

Trip advisor is full of people moaning about the quality of the hotel. My mate has just booked a week all inclusive in Portugal for 290 him and his lad. The hotel has been slated on trip advisor for not. Even up to the standard of a 4star hotel. The rate he got is not a special rate, just what it costs. What do people expect when they get cheap hotel. My mate is quite happy with the hotel as he understands the principal of getting what you pay for.

Must be good then..............you've had more holidays than Judith Chalmers & Alan Whicker put together.

My wife and daughter work in a three star hotel with 50 rooms to fill, their room rates are from £100 to £150 a night and normally their comments are very good, their work is inspected all the time and the management are very particular about guests comments.

All is fine until they hit a quiet period and decide to put some Groupon offers on to fill the rooms, Groupon works, they can go from half a dozen bookings for next weekend to a full hotel within two days if they put a 50% voucher on there - but then the complaints come in.

It bizarre that when you fill a hotel with people paying the full rate you get nothing but compliments, but fill it with people who have booked on a discount voucher and they'll p[iis[/is and whine all weekend.

"An internet troll's opinion should carry no more weight than graffiti"

This should be the standard response to every post from Keith Swiftcorn hereafter.

I bet the reviews get worse after you have been there old lad


I always find you get what you pay for

That's why we have to keep standing up to the unbalanced negative postings

damn right. thats what i work and ref saturday and sunday for

They used to say 'Don't believe verything you read in the press'.
I suppose the modern day equivalent has to be don't believe anything you read on the internet.

For a 3 star

Years ago, before the Internet, I read a book which had a vision of the future with an information network called the Web of Lies. How true.

There was a C4 documentary about some of the contributors to Trip Advisor. The people they featured had made it their life's work to travel around the country and ruin people's business's so they could show how "clever" they were. A revealing insight into the minds of the self obsessed. Small people, small minds, small lives.

I use Trip Advisor both as a contributor and for advice. I am always honest and as accurate as I possibly can be while trying to be as unemotive as possible.

I have always found that, without exception, if you take a majority of the reviews posted then you’ll be about there. For example if 90% of the reviews say that somewhere is good then generally it is good. As previously mentioned, these reviews are posted by unqualified, anonymous people and are therefore to not infallible and you’ll always get varied opinions. But on the whole if you go with the majority it’s usually accurate.

What you also have to remember is that people are far more likely to leave negative feedback than positive.

This is. Very true. You are more likely to be complained about rather than Praised for doing your job well

Where is Swiftcorn anyway...not heard from him for a while.......?

Yup - business rates for hotel rooms are always top dollar.

Unless you work for the company that I do

for some reason businesses rarely negotiate with rates possibly because many are booked at the last minute and they value the in-room facilities (wi-fi, desk space etc) more than the cost, they are also less likely to complain than your private paying punter because they aren't picking up the tab.

Another thing that happens frequently, and in fact happened this weekend to my daughter, is that they get the whole hotel block booked for weddings and generally the people who pay £15k and more for this privilege tend to be rather wealthy and have a high opinion of themselves, my youngest was on the bar this weekend and came home at 2am on Sunday morning disgusted with the behaviour and demeanour of people that she had thought should know how to conduct themselves better than they did - arrogant t0ssers is the words she used for them I think, but a true professional she smiled through it all and made sure that nothing was missed off their room charge bills, like a lot of hotels non-guests can't buy drinks after a certain time, it has to be charged to someone's room - some very arrogant posh people were due a shock when checking out on Sunday, serves them right for being so generous with their key number when drunk



Moral of the story is - don't treat hotel staff like the muck on the soles of your shoes, there are ways and means of making you pay

Not a troll as such, but I just got absolutely slapped down on twitter.

What do the kids say these days? PWNED?

Bad times.

He went quiet after last years Grand Final too..just for a day or so.

I totally agree with you FB & I do the same.
What's the alternative?
To use a so-called independent guide where you can never know if the hotel/restaurant has paid to be included?
I get newsletters from the Good Food Guide whose editor is Adam Raphael who has an almost pathological hatred for Tripadvisor & vents his spleen against it every available opportunity.
But then he would wouldn't he since it serves to replace his pricey & snobbish tome.
Sure Tripadvisor isn't perfect but I've used it to find some excellent hotels & places to eat in unfamiliar places.

I'm quite sure I rejected your sexual advances way back in August last year when you were sulking over Leeds latest loss to Wigan in a Final. Thanks for the attention but I'm not likely to change my mind.

I think any establishment that appears on TripAdvisor should have the knowledge and ability to respond to each post, the manager of the hotel I spoke of on the previous pages certainly does and he is happy to apologise to each poster who records a problem during their stay, the hotel reception also record each and every gripe and complaint that people make when they are checking out and whether or not discounts were offered at checkout and this information is put on the managers reply, for instance "I'm sorry that your steak was served cold, we acknowledged to you in the restaurant that we had an issue with a hotplate and we replaced your meal and gave you complimentary wine".

That sort of response turns a bad review into a good one and he is very savvy at doing that, including putting down obvious malicious complaints, someone who lists any manner of issues after they've paid in full, left the hotel and then sat on the information for three weeks will find something on the lines of an apology followed by an assurance that they checked their housekeeping and reception logs but could find no information to back up the complaint which is a shame as the issue could have been sorted at checkout and a discount offered.


Unfortunately many hoteliers just aren't that savvy enough to understand how to use TA to their advantage but its not helped by TA themselves who will not disclose when a poster has used multiple identities to post multiple malicious complaints on one or more sites, the hotels can complain to TA but its almost impossible to get them to move from their "its not our fault" position, whereas they could actually do a bit more to help both party's.

See you are still getting some 'Worm Burping' milage out of the old sexual advances fantasy...you want to be careful old boy you could go blind or have to shave the hair on your palms again.