Almost 31 million Germans, more than 50 per cent of the adult population, does use the internet for travel preparations; among them 7 million who have a look into social travel communities such as hotel review platforms before booking.

The question is, how reliable those rating-collectors are. The renowned German society for consumer research (Gesellschaft für Konsumforschung) has tested the most prominent players of the domestic market.

The testers even worked out fake reviews themselves and launched them in order to find out it the scrap filtering operator control of each platform would work.

It did, but not always.

Even by German market leader Holidaycheck some fakes passed the verification check which officials are so proud of. According to the management's information, all reviews have to pass one of the 41 editors of the content team - it can be up to 1500 per day!

According to GfK, at least two fake reviews came through and were published without control. Anyway, Holidaycheck did send response to all the guys had been rejected because of wrong data or other problems, GfK is delighted to comment. After all Holidaycheck has the best results in comparison to competitors and received the grade "good".

Cruzial was among other topics the number of hotels listed, the number of reviews, search optionen, presentation of the results and amount of information communicated.

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