New and notes from around the interweb:
- Gutting section 230 of the Communications Decency Act – which is gaining bipartisan support in Congress, as Democrats want online forums to have to moderate hate speech while Republicans want to take away legal protections from forums they view as unfriendly to conservatives – would mean the end of crowdsourced travel reviews which so many of us rely on.
Internet platforms like these rely not on their own travel expertise, but on the input and resources of millions of everyday people brought together online. They came about in part thanks to a 1996 law that’s making news today: Section 230. Passed when the internet was just ramping up, it’s still important for everything from your social media feed to Wikipedia.
…review sites are an influential tool that “give consumers a powerful voice in economic transactions” and no longer limit knowledge to word of mouth or the opinions of experts.
- The United Airlines terminal at Chicago O’Hare is all-in with the Chicago Bears’ 100th season.
- Four Seasons Bali Sayan has a Buddhist nun to rock you to sleep for a sacred nap.
- Financial performance of Chinee airlines declining
- Better hope American Airlines doesn’t lose your luggage. Not only aren’t they able to offer a checked baggage guarantee but when they lose your bags this happens:
Hey @AmericanAir. You guys lost my bag and gave it to a carrier who told me I needed to be up at 4am to receive my bag. I got up at 3. After waiting two hours, I finally got ahold of them. They told me due to not answering my phone, they are delivering at 10.
— Jeanne Marie Hoffman (@Jeanne23) September 2, 2019
Furthermore, if I go into my "lost bag file," it still says 4am delivery.
— Jeanne Marie Hoffman (@Jeanne23) September 2, 2019
Say what you want about Yelp and TripAdvisor, but they are essentially the voice of the people (travelers and other guests) which IMO have improved services especially at the Travel Industry. Politicizing or gutting these services from needed protection will take us back 20+ years in consumer protection achievements.
This is what happens once you begin down the road of suppressing free speech. It ALWAYS comes back to bit you. Now young people neither appreciate nor understand what free speech is, so it’s dead and isn’t coming back.
At one time a site such as Travel Advisor was useful. I have several reviews of various hotels in Europe on that site. Now, it is just a mess with horrible ads, pop up windows, they filter a number of the negative reviews especially if the hotel complains, etc.
I haven’t used either of those sites in years. It is unfortunate since at one time they were useful but like many of these blogs, they have moved over to bring owned/controlled by less than neutral parties.
What are Chinee airlines? Is that similar to pulling hair off my Chinee chin chin?
TripAdvisor and especially Yelp reviews are worse than useless. Huge prominence is given to people with silly grievances and grudges, or competitors who wish to damage a business, and planted reviews on the other side. There’s no common standard, which means that you would be crazy to rely on any of it. And, worse, they have killed off the reviews written by professionals who provided real balance and information.
The simple solution would be to have a law which makes someone responsible as publisher for all posts: if Yelp or TA verifies the ID of a poster and publishes their name, then the poster should become the publisher. Otherwise it should be Yelp or TA. This would mean that the outright lies would have consequences for the perpetrators
I find TripAdvisor reviews very helpful, and I take the time to post objective reviews on their site. Yelp is, to me, a place for people with nothing better to do than to have the conversations one used to attribute to “Valley Girls.”
Trip Advisor and Yelp are valuable
The only severe problem is censorship as they sell revenue rooms and they juggle ratings to their advantage for their bottom line.
When T.A, was started by the original couple it was truly honest and transparent simply outstanding
Its still helpful but harder to determine the full truth
If you see a 4.5 rating its likely a true 4.See a 4 star rating likely a 3.5 plus etc
Big fan of Yelp and TA. Yelp is almost always on the mark, TA less so, particularly for restaurants. Of course flyertalk is always the best source of info for seasoned travelers, but the breadth of coverage is not as good as Yelp and TA.
I used Trip Advisor for 10-15 years (about 10 years ago). Did all of my trip planning using the information I gathered on their site. I made many reports on my own travel experiences and enjoyed responding to folks who had questions about areas where I had been. It was a fairly clean site and easy to use.
What they are currently calling Trip Advisor is nothing like what they had before it became a pure money making machine.
Typical situation where something that is good and works well is sold and the idiots that buy it try to squeeze very dime out of users and than don’t understand why they lose readers/customers.
Between the shakedowns and the obsession with waitstaff licking feet, Yelp is terrible.
I think NB has it totally backwards, especially when it comes to Yelp. No one respects their rating system and you see so many ho-hun places get a highly disproportionate amount of five star reviews. Per their own guidelines 3-star is “a-okay” while five is “best I’ve ever had.” Look at the majority of reviewer’s histograms and you’d think every meal they eat is better than the last. Sure, you’ll get the cranky folks who spam 1star reviews but that becomes obvious in the establishment’s histogram. Three star needs to become the norm again.