Nov
28
Product Review
Posted by: tonyteng | November 28, 2010 | Leave a Comment
I was searching for the hotel rooms for my winter trip this coming December. As I read through promotion part, one of the promotion channel is product review. So how do you trust the reviews online?
The most obvious criterion that is objective is the price. I mean you can compare the price objectively unlike the experience of staying in the hotel. It must be good for value.
For reliable opinion, I asked my friends who have used the service before. But most of the time, we cannot find friends who have tried before due to our limited social network. This is perhaps known as word of mouth. Although travelling is one time product, hotels do need to offer good service to ensure their customers have pleasant stay.
Another alternative is the customer review of the website. I find this service is quite helpful because those reviews are the only available ‘trusted’ avenue to find whether the product is good. Of course some of them can be very extreme due to its subjectivity. But at least there are some constructive feedbacks. Also, some of the reviews can be faked by the company itself.
Definitely an independent body must be used to serve as intermediary. This is why I love tripadvisor.com. Generally, the feedbacks within the hotel website cannot be trusted because it is ‘filtered’ by the management. But having intermediary also means low regulations of the comments. For instance, company A can sabotage company B by writing bad comments.
So, in the end it is up to the customers to judge the hotel but generally the mechanism can be relied on as long as it is not abused by certain quarters. 