With over 20 million reviews there's hardly any guest who enters the door of a luxury hotel who hasn't first read about the property on TripAdvisor.

The TripAdvisor Home Page proudly boasts, "more than 15,000,000 travelers from 190 countries planned trips here this week." An astonishing statement.  Adding weight to this is word-of-mouth impact.  Research shows consumers believe reviews read online almost as much as they do personal recommendations from friends and relatives.

While many hospitality marketing professionals and travel agents don't care for TripAdvisor (how's that for PC?), our clients embrace it.  Through a series of proactive, custom-tailored strategies each hotel actively manages TripAdvisor and encourages guests to post reviews.  We treasure every TripAdvisor review - especially those with 5-Stars (or 5-Owls as TA refers to them).

But here's what gets my goat.  And the only reason I'm bringing it up is it's happened a couple of times now.

A guest writes an absolutely glowing review of a property and rates everything 5-Stars - Service, Value, Location, etc.  But in posting the review at the end they make an obvious mistake and rate the hotel as 1-Star.  The first time this happened customer support was contacted and asked to simply correct the guest's mistake and change it to 5-Stars which was obviously what the guest intended.

Instead of making the change, a few days later the review disappeared!

This happened again recently for another hotel.  Instead of contacting customer support an email was sent to management. It explained the situation as well as what had happened previously and asked them to please make the correction to 5-Stars.  A couple of days later the review disappeared!

When I post a golf score that's well outside my normal range (usually higher) the computer informs me it looks like a mistake and asks me if I want to change it.  With all their technological prowess, you'd think a similar fix would be simple for TripAdvisor.

Then I could rave about TripAdvisor all the time.

What do you think?  Safe travels - Madigan Pratt

Madigan Pratt is managing director of Madigan Pratt & Associates, Inc., an award-winning customer relationship marketing communications firm specializing in helping independent luxury hotels acquire and retain profitable customers, maximize revenue and ROI.  A well published author and popular conference speaker, Mr. Pratt has been a senior member of the Board of Directors of the Caribbean Tourism Organization (CTO-Executive Committee), Association of Travel Marketing Executives (ATME-Chairman) and the Travel & Tourism Research Association/New York (TTRA/NY-Chairman).

Mr. Pratt can be reached at: Madigan (@) MadiganPratt.com.  More information can be found at www.MadiganPratt.com