Unverified Reviews

A few years ago, I moved to Humboldt County, California for a project I started with some friends. While I was up there, I missed a lot of a amenities I had grown accustomed to, living in Orange County. Because of this, I made it a point to enjoy these things every time I came home to visit.

One of the things I really missed was Vietnamese food.

During one of my visits home, I had made lunch plans with a friend. I wanted Vietnamese food, and he didn’t really care so we decided we should meet somewhere for Pho, a Vietnamese beef noodle soup. We also decided we would meet somewhere in the middle.

Since I had been living twelve hours north, I was not entirely familiar with where to go to find a good bowl of Pho. This was even more true since I had to find a place “somewhere in the middle.” So I turned to Yelp.

I went to yelp.com, typed in the city where I wanted to to eat, and typed in “Vietnamese” as the type of restaurant, and Yelp returned a list of options that fit my criteria. So I sorted through the list and found the one that had the best reviews and ratings, and decided that’s where we should go.

I called my friend, excited to find a good Pho place, and gave him directions for where to meet. When we got there, he asked me what was good, so I told him what some of the Yelp reviews said, so we both ordered based on what Yelp told us to.

Unfortunately, the food was not very good. It wasn’t terrible, and looking back, I can see what the reviewers like about the place, but frankly it did not deserve the 4 and half star rating. The food was mediocre at best, the cost was a bit pricey, and the atmosphere was sterile. I would’ve given the place 2 stars had I wanted to take the time to go back to Yelp and write a review. I did not.

That’s one of the many problems I have with basing my decisions based on reviews. There is no verification process for the reviews. I’m sure some of the reviews were sincere, but I wonder how many of them were planted? That’s not unheard of. Many companies pay a lot of money to place “grass root” positive reviews of their product.

But that’s not just it. I’ve seen people post negative reviews on a review site because they had a personal grudge against an employee there. Some of these are blatant, naming names, others are more discreet, but still clearly agenda-filled.

Another flaw in the system is sometimes reviews are posted for the wrong place. Recently, there was a very negative review of Ramada Maingate at the Park posted on a trusted review site. Because we value all our customer feedback, we investigated the matter and noticed some discrepancies. Some of the details the reviewer described did not fit here.

We contacted the reviewer not only to straighten out some of the details, but also because we want to make things right if their review was true. As it turns out, this guest did not stay with us at all. They had stayed at another Ramada (there are 4 Ramada franchisees in the area) and just posted on the first one they found online.

To the site’s credit, when we told them about the situation, they took down the review and moved it to the appropriate page. But this got me thinking, how trust-worthy are these review sites? All these reviews basically have unverified information.

Now don’t get me wrong, I understand that in the case of Yelp and the restaurant, tastes just differ, and in all cases, there are reviewers that have legitimate concerns that they want to share. My worry is that I have been guilty in the past of putting too much trust in these sites from reviewers I don’t know.

All that to say, we are proud to have the reviews that we do on a lot of sites. But still, I caution to take these sites with a grain of salt. Ask your friends what they think of certain places; Facebook and Twitter is good for that.