TripAdvisor, the travel site that’s gained fame and fortune from using unpaid content from users to create an online travel empire, is in trouble for a list of the UKs dirtiest hotels it published recently. Turns out hotel owners want an EU commission to start looking into limiting anonymous reviews. Hotel owners would like make sure that “reviews are posted by genuine guests and not by rivals or people simply out to cause mischief.”
I’d have to agree. Anonymous reviews are pretty worthless unless there’s a critical mass of them. Sure, eventually you can learn enough to spot a clunker with pretty good accuracy, or at least you think you can.
The difference between (good) professional writing and anonymous drivel is in the details—no matter if the subject is pornography or hotel reviews. A pro can’t say “the room was too small” without defining exactly how many square feet too small is. A porn pro can’t say “it was gargantuan” without a ruler and…well, you get the picture.
It’s odd reading reviews that trumpet the idea that “service was not up to snuff” when we don’t know what snuff is, or what level of “service” the reviewer expects. Is “service” what’s provided by information gleaned from the staff? Or is bad service defined by the fact that nobody carried your 2700 pounds of luggage up to the room with a smile the minute you arrived? The degree of goodness or badness is always related to expectations, and a good reviewer has to be a slave to that fact. An anonymous unpaid reviewer isn’t necessarily a slave to any facts, and there’s the rub.
Besides, cleanliness isn’t the half of it. One of the memorably bad hotels I’ve ever stayed at was one of the cleanest. It cost more per night than I usually spend for a week in a self catering apartment. It had two bathrooms and a little office with a sofa. Every day the maid came in an rearranged my stuff on the desk so I had little chance of finding or making use of it, then turned on each of the 37 lights so that when I came home at midnight, stanco, or “tired as all get out” as we say in America, and pushed my card key into the wall I was greeted with an explosion of light. If I my tired eyes didn’t snap wide open from all that, I was certainly wide awake hours later when I had finally managed to extinguish all but the one light I’d need to turn on at night—what little was left by then of the darkness of it.
I don’t need a gargantuan room. Just a quiet place and a comfy bed without critters, a bathroom that works right and a staff that leaves me and my stuff alone. Now you know.
Here’s how I find hotels. (Hint: good companies limit reviews to folks who’ve stayed in those hotels, it’s not rocket science to program this stuff.)
Here’s the article which inspired this post.