Outi-Maaria Palo-oja

Earlier this month Hotelmarketing.com reported that travellers increasingly book from search and meta search engines in addition to social media sites. This of course puts pressure for online travel agents and other providers. But at the same time it gives power for customers: They have learned to use sophisticated apps and search information from a wide variety of sites just to compare prices, reviews, and make rational decisions over offerings.

Caroline Morris reminded us as a guest blogger on Econsultancy that not every review in social media is trustworthy. Are vicious reviews new form of bullying, she asks. The reviews that have been written right after bad service experience may cause enormous stress for travel business owners. One may ask, whether we are giving too much power for the hands of unsatisfied customers.

Critical view on reviews

I must admit, that reviews affect to my travel bookings, at least for hotel bookings. Only once they led me to choose wrong in Barcelona but usually they’ve been roughly right. I’m pretty sure that people are getting more media critic when reading the reviews. One bad evaluation among a bunch of good or average reviews does not affect booking behaviour. Everybody knows that cock-ups happen once in a while. But I’m not sure that those who book for the same day are patient enough for comparing reviews and evaluate them critically. (See report by Andrew Sheivachman of Hotelmanagement.net  about Expedia’s findings that customers have become more and more ad hoc bookers.)

In travel business as in any business, the most important thing is to serve well. It means that businesses must keep their service promises and meet the requirements they have made customers to expect. The customers who are happy with the service will not share bad reviews. Is this just naiive, but can’t customers be sometimes right in their reviews?