We rely on the opinions of our peers to make informed decisions. This holds true in our personal lives, and it extends to our social selves, creating a strong reliance on word-of-mouth advertising and online reviews.
Businesses caught onto this quirk of human nature and have started taking advantage of it. The internet made it easier than ever to push fake news or release biased opinions to sway consumers in a more profitable direction.
Censored and fake reviews seem harmless enough when it comes to trinkets in online stores. But when you’re planning a vacation or looking for a lush travel destination, there’s a lot more at stake than pocket change.
Travelers spend thousands of dollars on a single trip. And naturally, they want the best experience possible. Most turn to travel review sites such as TripAdvisor or Yelp when looking for points of interest or places to eat.
But with the increasing centralization of sites like these, those reviews have become unreliable at best, and outright lies at worst.
Many of the problems with the travel reviews industry can be addressed by taking a fresh look at the system from the ground-up. Decentralizing these services, for example, could eliminate many of the trust and reliability issues, all thanks to blockchain technology.
Traveling for Profit
Worldwide travel, tourism, and hospitality is a multi-trillion dollar industry. Its largest sub-sectors include accommodations, air travel, and food — three essentials that make up over 45% of the industry’s profits.
In a 2013 study released by the World Travel & Tourism Council, tourism in the U.S. generated more than 5.6 million jobs and $448 billion in GDP. To put that in perspective, travel and tourism brought in more earnings than the insurance or food and beverage industries.
These numbers have grown significantly in recent years. In 2016, travel and tourism in the U.S. generated $1.5 trillion in economic output, supporting over 7.6 million jobs. These numbers are expected to rise sharply over the next six years.
Our tendency to prioritize peer opinions means that the deciding factor in where to stay, which airline to fly, and which restaurants to favor often comes down to online reviews. This gives popular review sites like TripAdvisor and Yelp a virtual monopoly on where people spend their money.
Travel is a big business, and few of the organizations involved are willing to take chances when it comes to profit. Preferential treatment, censoring user submissions, and paid-for reviews are not uncommon practices. This provides visitors with a list of businesses that bring the travel site more profits, not a collection of the best restaurants or most interesting destinations.
Centralization, Trust, and Control
Centralization has eroded the reliability of the travel information industry. When a single entity controls what opinions are displayed and which businesses visitors see, it clearly doesn’t exist for the benefit of travelers.
Just take a look at TripAdvisor, one of the world’s largest travel review destinations. The site has built its brand on trust and honesty, yet it operates with almost zero transparency. Businesses that pay extra get preferential treatment in site rankings and search results, and hotels are strong-armed into upgrading paid packages or face reduced visibility.
These practices do not benefit users, they only increase a single company’s profits. They’re toxic for small businesses and they hurt travelers in the long run.
Reliability of published reviews is another source of frustration. If a traveler had a bad experience at a destination, they should be allowed to share their thoughts. Unfortunately, centralized travel sites have a financial incentive to keep these to a minimum.
The average domestic trip costs a traveler about $144 per night. For international trips, that figure jumps to $271. Most people put a tremendous amount of research into their travel plans before stepping on a plane. If they form their opinions by reading pay-for-popularity travel sites, they’re probably not getting the best experience possible.
No Incentive for Quality Content
The current market leaders in the travel reviews industry lack any systems that encourage accurate submissions. It’s quantity over quality, which is great for web traffic but terrible for generating usable information.
The underlying problem is incentive. Users who share reviews for restaurants, hotels, and the like are offered nothing for their efforts. This directly impacts the travel community. Fewer people are able to spend time creating in-depth reviews, allowing inaccurate pieces and emotional rants to dominate the scene.
The incentive issue has a trickle-down problem, as well. With lower quality reviews pouring in on a massive scale, travel sites must hire quality control teams to check content for inaccuracies. These groups can catch obvious errors, but it’s unlikely they possess intimate knowledge of every attraction on their site.