fake reviews on hostel world

[Marta]

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.

[crhostel]

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%.

[Marta]

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.

[santa klaus]

Email your hostel buddy at HW. I talked with ours (Stefano) recently while he was in Vienna and he told me they are well aware of the problem and want to do something about it.

We had a case here in Vienna recently: there is a summer hostel which is only open between July and September, and they had a review (of course 100%) in May. I emailed Hostelworld and they removed it.

[Hostels]

Here's one of the other threads about the IP address issue:
Tripadvisor Reviews

A list of ideas for booking engines:

• ban all reviews from anonymous proxies
• Use the IP addresses to compare the city that the property was booked in with the city where the review was written. If the hostel is in London and an unusual number of bookings and reviews all come from inside London, it should flag it for manual review.
• Compare names and billing addresses of credit cards. If someone has made three 1-night bookings for a single hostel in a 6-month review period on their credit cards, flag it for human review. In many/most cases repeat visitors to a hostel won't book all their stays on HW, but will typically book the additional stays through the hostel.
• Scenario: low-rated hostel tells their employees to make bookings on their credit cards and then reimburses them. It could be tracked with something like this: If (7 of the last 10 reviews written from the property's IP C-block) are significantly different from (7 of the last 10 reviews written outside the property's city) then flag the hostel for manual review.
• To track people doing the same outside of the hostel's computer network: If (7 of the last 10 reviews written from within 100 miles of the hostel) are significantly different from (7 of the last 10 reviews written outside 100 miles of the hostel) then flag the hostel for manual review.
• for hostels using BPO, don't send review email if the guest doesn't check-in
• look for other patterns based on complaints from hostels

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.

[Scotch Argus]

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.

[santa klaus]

Originally Posted by Scotch Argus

At a complete guess it seems to be more common in Eastern Europe

Yes, because most hostels there are pretty small, hence do not get many reviews, hence there is a big effect of a few fake 100% ratings.

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 don´t care about HW anyway - they sell most of their beds to school groups.

[Hostels]

Originally Posted by santa klaus

You would have to submit dozens of fake ratings to see any effect at all.

There's a spreadsheet for calculating the numbers if anyone is interested in researching a competitor:

• How quickly can you raise your Hostelworld ratings? (spreadsheet)
• Hostelworld Ratings Improvement Worksheet

Here's a new poll for hostel managers:
Poll: Do you think your competitors write fake hostel reviews?