Pretend Your A Tripadvisor Bed Tester And Score A Discount Deal?
German Katja Bunge, housekeeper of the Wallstreet Park Plaza Hotel, makes a bed in a room with a carpet, looking like a one dollar bill, in Berlin on Monday, March 13, 2006. The rooms and the interior of the new hotel, which is located at the Wallstrasse (Wallstreet) in the German capital, are styled with symbols and themes of the stock exchange at Wall Street, New York.
THIS isn’t, perhaps, entirely the wisest public complaint that a restauranteur or hotelier has ever made. The whine is that people are turning up and insisting that they’re very important reviewers on Tripadvisor. Therefore, give me a deal:
Hotels and restaurants are being targeted by ‘blackmailers’ who demand free meals and stays in exchange for not writing bad reviews on TripAdvisor, hospitality chiefs have warned.
The fraudsters are telling staff they will post bad comments on the review site if they don’t get better service, free food or upgrades.
Restaurant, hotel and B&B owners across the UK have reported a huge rise in the number of customers who use TripAdvisor as a threat.
Maybe this is all true and that the country is infested with deal seeking bastards. However, it is a little unwise to tell us all about this in the pages of the Daily Mail, isn’t it? For surely there are some of us dim enough not to have thought this up on our own (I certainly hadn’t) but greedy enough to try it out (maybe…).
So, by making the complaint public they’ve just increased the number of people who might try it on.
This is always a problem with customer sourced ratings of course. We’ve seen it in the US with Rate My Professor for example, where students give marks to the people teaching them their college courses. It wouldn’t have taken a genius to work out what then happened: kids would threaten that they would give the professor a bad grade unless their own bad grade for that class weer improved.
So it is here: so, whose off to open a Tripadvisor account in order to score a free steak then?
Posted: 9th, May 2014 | In: Money, The Consumer Comment (1) | TrackBack | Permalink
