Travel Journalist Ed Hasbrouck breaks down the door into the fake user site world with his Practical Nomad Blog when he transcribes a discussion at the 2006 PhoCusWright marketing conference.

“Elias Plishner, V.P. of the interactive division of the McCann-Erickson advertising agency, boasted that, ‘We have an entire division in Singapore [where labor is cheaper than in the USA] devoted to seeding online forums and bulletin boards with targeted content’ for our advertising clients. Worse, these people are paid to spend months, in between assignments, creating profiles and posting ‘neutral’ messages to establish a credible online persona and background from which to post their secretly-paid advertising messages, such as to promote a newly-released movie.”

So all those times I thought I was looking at reviews from one genuine traveler to another on the megasites were hoaxes? Ouch! But not necessarily true for all travel sites. Many don’t want the spammers around but don’t know how to control it.
J.R. Johnson, CEO of VirtualTourist claims that they are “sabotaging our credibility. But what can we do?”

Well Mr. Johnson and the rest of you, there actually are some things you can do when trying to separate the phony baloneys from the real deal reviewers.

1. Anything that is an “A+! 100%!” review with no real opinion to back it up is probably a fake.

2. On the same note, no angry guest is going to take the time to leave a half assed message and then turn around and give the hotel a mediocre rating or a “second chance.” However, if they seem like a raving lunatic about how doomed the trip was because of the hotel, now that might have some truth behind it!

3. The review will also often have an experience that had happened at one point in time during their trip. If there is no specified point in time, there probably was not a trip.

So the bottom line is keep your eyes peeled for points in time as well as biases because real reviewers will have them while those creepy fakes won’t.

Photo of disgruntled user courtesy of Crystal Fithen.