The dark side of consumer reviews

Once upon a time, when expertise still meant something in our society, there were experts who knew more about a subject then you did. You asked your travel agent about the new Orient Express hotel hugging the coast in Ravello or the five-star inclusive along the Playa Maya.

Sometimes, if you were lucky, you spoke to an agent who was so knowledgeable that she could actually reel off specific hotel room numbers from her little black book, a book compiled from 20 or 30 years of enduring three- and four-day inspection trips; snapping photos of bathrooms and views off the balcony; briefings by hotel property execs. That's a lot of trudging up and down stairs, comparing room types, taking notes.

Your stock in trade was your collection of personal experiences. Your own little black book.

Now, we all carry the same black book. We all have access to so much data that a new type of traveler has emerged. The self-confident, self-educated hotel consumer, eager to demonstrate his or her hotel superiority, is tough to deflate. Armed with reviews from Trip Advisor and other consumer review sites, consumers, confident that they are armed with the "truth," constantly challenge today's agents.

But how accurate is hotel information gleaned from reviews written by the public at large? Not accurate at all, it turns out. The simple truth is that the Internet is the most efficient method ever devised to quickly transmit misinformation in a cost-efficient manner to the largest possible audience.

So marketing departments maintain lists of pseudonyms so they can plant seeds. Certain important Internet personalities, primarily bloggers, receive free products or payment in kind for their raves or for spewing unkind words about a competitor.

As Smart Money pointed out in its November issue last year, bloggers are being enticed by free trips and fancy gadgets into "planting fake reviews."

This new process has a name. It is called "buzz marketing," and the nation's largest PR firms are setting up buzz marketing departments designed to influence the word of mouth generated by consumer reviews. There is even a trade group to promote buzz marketing with more than 300 members, including household names like Best Buy and AOL.

Major corporations are beginning to staff buzz marketing positions. In researching this article, it took me all of four minutes to find an ad for a blog/viral manager of buzz marketing placed by Blockbuster Video's online subscription services. The successful applicant would need to "embed yourself and the Blockbuster brand in the online community."

And, sounding a bit like a conspirator, the person in this position will be expected to "develop a network of trusted evangelists and influencers who write and speak online."

Dell Computer was devastated by an onslaught from online bloggers intent on damaging the firm's credibility in the area of customer service. Was this orchestrated?

How hard would it be to employ chat rooms to launch an attack on your hotel competitor masquerading as reviews? How hard would it be to find some bloggers willing to shape their "buzz" for free gifts, cash or in-kind payments?

What we do know is that, according to Pew Research, more than 57 million of us read blogs. We read the strings of comments made about hotels worldwide, and virtually all of these hotel "reviews" have one thing in common: Each is written by someone who is using a fictitious identity. The Edelman public relations firm, one of the largest, admits to "reaching out" to bloggers that attract as few as 10 readers.

What does "reaching out" mean? If opinions can be manipulated and paid for, how valuable are the reviews our clients are bringing to us? Who writes them and what are their motivations?

And, dear friend, why have we, as an industry, been so silent on this topic? We have access to services that provide independent hotel inspection reports, and we still personally inspect dozens of properties in an average year.

Yet consumers think they can get better information from someone they have never met, someone who is using a made-up identity, someone who might well be under the influence of powerful corporations.

I remember a dinner in Lugano, Switzerland, many years ago. I was sitting with one of the world's top hotel inspectors, a former general manager at a famous property. We were working on our second bottle of a lush cabernet when he explained that each of the really top-tier hotels had one thing in common: The maid's cleaning cart was brought into the room.

The reason was that the maids were taught to use Polaroid cameras. Almost half of all guests in luxury hotels move the furniture around a bit. The maid, before cleaning, snaps a photo of the room as the guest has left it. That photo goes on the guest's permanent profile and the room will be set up properly the next time they check in.

"That's how you tell a top-tier hotel," I was advised.

I never read that on the Internet.

Contributing editor Richard Turen owns Churchill and Turen, a vacation-planning firm, and has been named to Conde Nast's list of the World's Top Travel Specialists since the list began.