Paris Hotel Reviews: Can you trust them?

There is a big problem with hotel proprietors and employees making up fake, favorable reviews for their hotels in the peer review sections. I wrote about it here:

http://www.businesstravellogue.com/accommodation/hotel-reviews-some-are-more-fake-than-michael-jacksons-nose.html

Scary Stuff.

Thanks Carrie for the ‘heads-up’ on the fake hotel reviews. How do you separate the real reviews from the liars? Another challenge. I’ve become increasingly cynical about hotel reviews, especially when it comes to Hotels with Charm kind of lists. You pay twenty of thirty dollars to buy a book that you hope is going to get you to a nice quaint hotel and you end up getting stuck in the boiler room (when you know whoever reviewed that hotel probably got the VIP suite!

I was going to chime in about the fake reviews too(and thank you for the mention). Hotels are basically hiring people to create fake personas and using them to post reviews.

I don’t evaluate our hotel reviews at SlowTrav so can’t speak to how many fake reviews we receive but I know we do receive them for vacation rentals on occassion. Sometimes they’re not so much fake, as a situation where the owner asks his/her friends to write reviews, which we also do not allow. Sometimes they’re easy to spot, and other times, they slip through.

I think your advice is good, to read through all the reviews for a given property to get a more balanced picture of that property. Some sites allow you to see all the reviews by a given person too - so you can generally find out if the reviewer writes negative reviews or glowing reviews by nature; then you know to take his comments with a grain of salt.

Last comment, I promise, another thing I like to consider when reading a review is how much the reviewer paid for the property and try to get a feel for what they expected. For example we stayed in a hotel that was only €90 a night in Paris - I thought it a good deal; I also wouldn’t go anywhere near expecting a “luxury” or even a step below that type of property for €90 - basically I expected a bed. If my expectations had been different or if I had been staying at the hotel for longer than 2 nights, I might have dinged the hotel for being something they never intended to be. Does that make sense? So you have to make sure the reviewers expectations and type of hotel they’re at jive.

Okay - I lied - last comment really - maybe we should take hotel reviews like olympic scores - throw out the best, throw out the worst and the ones in the middle count.

Totally agree with you regarding high expectation level for the 90 Euro hotel in Paris. Take a look at what you get in London for 90 Euros and there’s a huge difference. However, no matter how cheap your hotel price, there should be an acceptable level of cleanliness, clean bed linens, towels, bathrooms, etc. and the rest is icing on the cake. The kindness of hotel receptionists can make up for a multitude of negatives, but nothing makes up for lack of cleanliness.