Blogs

Certainly this is not to say that powerhouse, dedicated review sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor will soon be obsolete, or redundant. But as travelers increasingly use ratings and reviews less to research a trip ( or product/service), and more to actually buying, the importance of broad-based, dedicated rating sites may be declining. 

Why?

Customers are now going directly to those websites that post reviews from multiple sources, especially from their own customers, thus reducing the clout of broad

Hotels live and die by the number and kinds of reviews they get. Especially on TripAdvisor, because the quantity, quality and frequency of reviews a hotel receives there, determine a hotels  all-important ranking.
Very little is said about the authenticity of a review, but regardless, even a small change in TripAdvisor's rankings can send shock waves, and deeply impact a hotel's website and revenue.

Hotelmarketing.com points out that TripAdvisor's rankings are based on a propriety algorithm cal

Reviews are critical to the hotel industry’s success. In fact, they’re critical to just about any business, but hotels are especially vulnerable because a hotel stay is a big emotional and financial investment, and travelers want to get it right.

So they read many hotel reviews, and read them carefully. Hotel Marketing says that reviews can make or break a hotel, but the site asks, who really writes hotel reviews.
Do women write them more than men?
Do men have more positive or negative things t

TripAdvisor Barred from Claiming Reviews are Honest, Real

Hotelmarketing’sweb site broke news saying  that a UK advertising “watchdog” ruled that since  TripAdvisor’s reviews can be posted with no form of verification, TripAdvisor “must no longer claim all of its reviews are honest or from real people.”

What can this possibly mean to a company whose entire reason for existence is based on reviews?

James Hall, Consumer Affairs editor at the Telegraph noted that the language the UK’s Advertisin