With all the issues brewing around malicious reviews and ownership of review data, one online review site is trying another method.
TripReviews does this, it claims, by allowing businesses to display and post reviews on their own site and allowing users to better control their reviews.
The service, a relative newcomer to the review space, has been dutifully aggregating both reviews and ratings (reviews without content) since 2007.
The site has aggregated over 400,000 ratings and 6,000 reviews and has taken a different approach from the larger review sites by promoting its widget which allows reviewers to post reviews on a hotel, travel agent's or tour operators own website, syndicating full reviews through RSS, and even plugging into TripReviews full content XML API.
TripReviews CEO and Founder Sean Rollinson says:
"The reason for TripReviews is simple, to give businesses a review platform that encourages their customers to share their experiences. TripReviews is also geared towards helping promote the supplier's own business. There's no ads for competitors on the review pages."
The TripReviews platform was originally developed so that travel agents and tour operators could invite their customers to write reviews of their recent vacations and share them on their own websites.
Rollinson's other business, Escapes.ca, for example, has been using the TripReviews widget and XML API for hotel and destination reviews for over two years and has solicited hundreds of reviews from customers in that time.
Although the site lacks a lot of the bells and whistles of sites like TripAdvisor and Yelp, the approach is also fundamentally different.
TripReviews is not a destination site, in other words - it is not meant to be the place where a traveler goes to compare a variety of services or browse for hotels, but rather a place to go to find reviews about a specific destination, hotel or attraction.
This distributed approach to review aggregation and the focus on the business being reviewed is one reason why it has remained relatively low key.
Registered reviewers who have written a review in haste and, a few weeks later, are feeling reviewer's remorse, have the ability to delete their reviews at anytime, a simple feature that seems to be unavailable on most other review websites.
In addition to this feature, visitors have the ability to rate the usefulness of a review, post their own comments on the review, contribute to summaries and contact information, and to view and contact the original reviewer.
According to Rollinson, TripReviews has only removed a handful of reviews from the site primarily due to duplication or questionable content.
"If a hotel or attraction disputes the authenticity of a review, they can write a comment directly on the review or contact the registered user directly.
"If a review is anonymous, then we have the right to delete the review at anytime. Our belief is that if a reviewer is not going to take responsibility for their review and be accountable for its content, then we have no obligation to give them a voice on the site or protect their opinion."
Although this seems like a hard line to take with anonymous reviews, it hasn't been a huge issue since most of the reviews are a direct result of an invitation to review from the travel agent, operator, or hotel.
Rollinson adds:
"Most of the reviews through our Escapes.ca site for example have been derived using the 'Invite a Friend' feature which we use to schedule and send out review invitations to customers. The scheduled invitation is a great way to engage with customers after their trip and also ensures the review is authentic."
This proactive approach to writing reviews seems to result in fewer negative reviews being posted to the system in general and helps build the properties reputation and brand. Will this open business driven approach reduce fake or malicious reviews, it is hard to say.
Given that businesses are more engaged with the system by posting the reviews on their own websites, they may be much quicker to respond and address reviews as they are posted.
NB: Disclosure – Tnooz Node Stephen Joyce's company Sentias Software Corp developed TripReviews in partnership with Escapes.ca.