Fruity and ostentatious, yet highly fictitious: Online restaurant, hotel reviews easy to fake
Filed under: Extracurriculars, Food, Ripoffs and Scams, Shopping, Travel, Fraud
We all do it. When we're planning a trip to an unfamiliar city or we're looking for a new hole-in-the-wall for a dinner date near home, we poke around online for reviews of local restaurants.
But on some sites, reviews are serving up a steaming plate of B.S.
WalletPop told you about the hugely popular Yelp, which has been accused of extorting restaurants and shops that got received bad reviews. For a price, says a San Francisco CBS affiliate, Yelp will move the badmouthing blurb lower down the page, potentially out of sight. One sofa store owner paid Yelp $350 a month to bury her embarrassing reviews.
Last year, one New York City hotel was awarded a five-star review by an effusive reader of TripAdvisor. Except the hotel hadn't even completed construction yet. Public relations flacks were suspected.
This sort of stuff happens all the time. TripAdvisor says it tries to weed out these obviously false postings. But some readers allege it swerves too far even in that. One travel expert about Hawaii accuses TripAdvisor of twice killing reviews that conflicted with its paid sponsors. For sites like these, integrity is everything. Many publications, though, don't have the resources to do the follow-ups necessary. Increasingly, the phonies are not apparent.
The latest review organ to be slammed is Wine Spectator, whose opinions appear in published form, online, and on those little gushy review cards stuck to the wine racks at liquor stores everywhere. Gunning for the publication's Award of Excellence, a scamster with a point to prove invented a fake Milanese restaurant with a real address, drew up a bogus menu and wine list, and sent in the $250 fee for consideration. It got the award.
The hoax even spread to other user-review sites. Chowhound, a widely used restaurant tipster bulletin board, posted convincing information to back up the existence of the fake place that would turn up in web searches. Reading them, you'd never suspect the place didn't actually exist.
Wine Spectator published a response that says, in effect, that it was deliberately hoaxed with convincing fakery. True. But the point is that it was hoaxed. Easily. A stunter did it this time. How many awards were given to real establishments trying to boost their names by fraud?
A single attempted trip to the Osteria L'Intrepido would likely have sent the house of cards crashing down. But the "Award of Excellence" classification is issued mostly by paper-pushers armed with not much more than a computer and a telephone. Like your high school class ring, the Award of Excellence bestows the glimmer of false prestige to any yokel with the cash to pony up.
These blow-ups don't make these sites useless. I believe most people use them honestly (although, in the case of Yelp, not always intelligibly). But follow these suggestions to make them work best for you:
* Read as many reviews for a given place as you can and ignore the most glowing and most angry postings, which could be either from the owners or their rivals
* If an entry reads like it was written by a PR person (too detailed, too ecstatic), it just might have been.
* Post regular reviews of your own on the sites you like. The more people post, the more the sites' phony write-ups will be diluted, and the more useful the databases become
* For some destinations with legions of fans, like Walt Disney World, read carefully to determine whether the reviewer is truly appraising or unduly starry-eyed
* Always consider the source and account for cultural differences. For example, American tourists complain bitterly about the small hotel rooms in Europe
* Don't reach conclusions about places with only a few reviews
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
8-22-2008 @ 12:20AM
George said...
There are obviously issues with the whole review format as it currently exists. Our view is that reviews will always be important but down the road people will use is as a secondary tool to video.
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8-23-2008 @ 6:54AM
stnsmok said...
Propaganda makes the world go around.
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8-23-2008 @ 5:34PM
teltech54 said...
If anyone believes anything anyone writes about anything on the internet they deserve what they get. There is no accountability on the internet and anything anyone writes should be taken with a box of salt. The internet is merely a place for people to play who have nothing better to do.
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8-23-2008 @ 8:56AM
Iam said...
I took my family on a Vacation last December to a timeshare Resort. I Made reservations in the dark..we were going to Orlando for Christmas.. I got a GREAT DEAL.!!!
For only $ 99. we had 4 days 3 nights, plus2 adult tickets for Universal Studios ( which we choose)
The catch was to do a 90 min tour, which lasted 4 hrs, there were so many questions being asked, by me I had to know everything..They present you with a week at a HIGH price and nogiate down....I was on vacation , so I played the game .I did not buy on day 1, or 2 or 3..
Every morning The BROKER , cutting out the middle guy made better offers...I STILL did not buy , but then on day 4,
I decided to at least get a vacation package for $1,000.
Which locked in my lowest cost for 2 yrs plus I will get 5 full weeks at any of their other properties...I thought not a bad deal.
When I got home I did look at the reviews for the property I was at and read A LOT of BAD and negative reviews. I was shocked reading thinking these people were on drugs. My family had a great time ,the Resort was clean , property well maintained. The only thing I was not happy with was all the housekeepers did not speak ENGLISH...and the BROOKER WAS A SHARK on a feeding freenzy...I later found out that property had the record for sales due to I guess not taking the INITIAL "NO I AM NOT INTERESTED "..
I did leave a positive review and do plan on going back to the Resort.. On the same vacation I went to another Time share RESORT and walked in there knowing what I was looking for..
I put cards on the table and told them, what I was looking for and what I wanted to spend, it took an hour to get thru the process and we go to use the water park on the property as often as we can.. Its a nice day trip for the kids..
Have a Great day !!! srry it was long :(
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8-23-2008 @ 9:26AM
tio tony said...
Everything is B.S., everything. These computers can be used to "cook up" anything. Kind of like the news media.
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8-23-2008 @ 2:20PM
RONNIE OF STATEN ISLAND N.Y. said...
IS THERE ANYTHING SACRED ANYMORE???????
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8-23-2008 @ 10:01AM
Diana said...
I used to do mystery shops and restaurant reviews. Most of it is bs. You write what they want you to write. Some of them will TELL you that they want a 100% positive review. I have written some reviews online that were negative, but accurate. At least half of them disappeared.
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8-23-2008 @ 10:30AM
Truthteller said...
That's why I and my family have never listened to critics for restaurants, movies, or anything. There is too much graft involved.
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8-23-2008 @ 11:53AM
Alma said...
I used to be a fan of Yelp and wrote several honest reviews of establishments in my area. A couple months in, a negative review I wrote (which clearly did not violate any of their review policies) was removed by Yelp because they deemed it offensive. I called censorship and removed myself from the Yelp community altogether after that. I suspected that the restaurant in question didn't enjoy my review and requested removal.
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8-23-2008 @ 12:13PM
Dan said...
Where I live you know exaclty the type of people who say the negative about certain restaurants or stores. They are the people that you know to avoid their reviews because they have their heads so far up their behinds that no one likes them. Unfortunately they all wear skin tight pants and black framed glasses and think theyre so intelligent that they will give a crappy place 5 stars when the food/service is also crappy and a more "upscale" place that actually has really good service/food a 1 star just because its main stream. I do write reviews and I do talk about what I ordered and how the wait staff was etc. Even if its a place that I normally wouldnt go to, I will speak my mind which is pretty much what these websites allow people to do.
If that woman's furniture store really stunk, then other people might want to know about it and try it anyways and others who dont want to be bothered dont have to.
Its their own fault for providing crappy service in the first place.
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8-23-2008 @ 12:17PM
lewis said...
Believe none of what you hear and only a fraction of what you see and nothing told you by the press and or a politician very littof what a judge or lawyer says. Besides most democrats are lawyers so that leavesd them out and onlt a minute bit of republicians who have been bought by lobbiest wg=ho runs the country, Boy are we in a hurt. God help the US we need it.
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8-23-2008 @ 12:23PM
Dean said...
Only an idiot would believe those ads on TV and else where.
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8-23-2008 @ 12:28PM
Ron Swenson said...
Wine Spectator is such a fraud anyway. They know they can make or break a winery with one of their precious reviews. Glad they got a taste of their own medicine!
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8-23-2008 @ 12:53PM
iam said...
Even E bay someone can write a bad review about you...just because they did not get what the thought they were buying. They can see apic get a fulldescription and when they get it don't like it .
Buyer BEWARE....Seller your on your own...
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8-23-2008 @ 1:06PM
JIm said...
Jason Cochran writes in his story to beware of too much detail in a review saying one should suspect it was written by a PR person if it is too detailed or too ecstatic. I disagree. I have a restaurant with scores of reviews all over the internet and I can't believe the amount of ecstacy and detail the writers provide. One diner even went to the trouble of taking our food home, placing it on his own plates, photographing it and posting the food shots in his review. I don't have the foggiest idea of who the guy is. People detail the ingredients in the dishes they ordered and the preparation techniques employed, often getting information wrong. They passionately rave about the place as if they have a vested interest in it. Many are very thorough, reviewing everything from the name of our restaurant, to the location, the ambiance, the service, the presentation, the tastes, the ingredients, to anything else that comes to mind. So, don't let an ecstatic review or extremely detailed account of the diner's experience raise a red flag in your mind about the authenticity of the account. If you do you will think that 90% of our reviews are phony, and they are not.
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8-23-2008 @ 5:20PM
MFB said...
I had this very same experience a few years ago, for lunch I took some students to Harrisburg, PA, to a hotdog/sandwich shop THE SPOT that got rave reviews, it was across the street from the capitol, and stated that all the legislators loved the place, and came there during their breaks. Was I embarrassed. This greasy, bug infested joint was full of real bums (not just the legislator kind), and the food was unpalatable. I made sure that my entire class wrote reviews and submitted them.
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