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| General Hostel Operations Discussions about hostel operation topics that aren't covered in another forum category. |
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Hi guys, do you have any suggestions what to do about unfair competition i.e. hostel owners / managers making bookings in their own hostel via Hostel World or asking their family members to do so in order to boost their ratings? Of course they give themselves top 100% rating!
Unfortunately Hostel World doesn't seem to care as they're still getting the fee & 10% of each booking. |
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This has been discussed on HM a lot. One way to curb this is for hostelworld to track ip addresses better, to see where reservations are coming from and where reviews are coming from. The argument against this is that guests might not be able to book your hostel for the future, while they are staying with, through HW. Or, maybe HW wouldn't let the person write a review from the hostels IP address.
Quite a few of our guests write their reviews while they are still staying with us. It's a problem, but I think travelers more often than not can be savvy enough to weed out the fake reviews. Not sure what else HW could do, and really, why should they care? Like you said, they're getting their 10%. |
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Sorry for being repetative then. I looked but somehow missed these topics. I don't need to have their IP address as this person was stupid enough to log in using real name as their nickname. And as it happens I know them as they used to work for me before they changed jobs. It's just so petty that I cannot let it go.
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Here's one of the other threads about the IP address issue:
Tripadvisor Reviews A list of ideas for booking engines:
Maybe they already do these things, but if not, it should reduce the problem. Hostel managers would still try to game the system, but they would just be wasting their money because they wouldn't get the review emails. The booking engines could even apply the algorithm to last season's reviews and see which hostels are trying to game the system.
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It does annoy me to see what I think might be fake reviews on HW for sure. My only hope is that if they are gross exaggerations then honest people who are enticed to go through the positive reviews will leave negative ones. Hopefully as the number of reviews mounts up then the effect of bogus positive reviews will be negated. At a complete guess it seems to be more common in Eastern Europe - perhaps it's new hostels that start up that do it? I can never understand how a place can have only glowing reviews - no matter how good you are you'll always get critics, as it's impossible to please all the people all the time.
e.g. if you have a vibrant center city location some will love it, but others complain it's too noisy. Or if you're in a peaceful rural location most people will love it, but you'll always get someone who'll review you as being in the middle of nowhere. |
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Quote:
If you own one of those 120 small hostels in Budapest, you can only sell beds through HW if your ratings are extremely good or your beds are extremely cheap or if you use unconventional marketing strategies like Aboriginal. In Munich, there are only 11 hostels, the smallest one with 200 beds. Some of them have hundreds of ratings, ours even more than 1000. You would have to submit dozens of fake ratings to see any effect at all. Those without hundreds of ratings are the ones which donīt care about HW anyway - they sell most of their beds to school groups. |
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Quote:
Here's a new poll for hostel managers: Poll: Do you think your competitors write fake hostel reviews? |
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