I travel a lot, especially for work. Typically, I use an agency to book everything, but in the rare occasion that I must travel for personal reasons, I usually use either Booking.com or Airbnb. I am price oriented however I try to stay safe above all, therefore the second main criterion that I use is the users’ ratings. Sometimes I check also the comments (for bad things and for originality – which I believe give legitimacy to the ratings) but I mainly shortlist the options based on ratings 8 and above.

A week ago, I got a strange request from a friend of mine. He recently listed his Airbnb on Google for clients to find it easier, and he asked to give him a “fake” rating of 5 stars to boost it. The reason behind that was to help clients locate the place on google maps (it is not on a very central place, and you definitely need some help from google maps). The 5 stars will help identify the place and perhaps redirect the potential client to the relative platform. I know the place, but I never stayed there. I know it is a nice place and the owners are honest and helpful. Should I give them the fake review? Do all the others have original reviews? Does it even matter for such a listing in google maps?

I read some weeks ago, that you can get paid to give good or bad ratings on such platforms. Especially google reviews are not verified and they verify that the experience was real. So, what is the point of all these?

Conclusion:

Again, in these ratings what we actually do, is that we put our trust in stories, we trust rumours, that gain legitimacy only if they are persistent. Google does not have any means to verify that the story and the experience is real. Sometimes we might even be affected by reviews that create suspicion. For example, extremely contradicting reviews, especially when they are very close time wise to each other. Also, the scale used for rating (plain 0-5) is not reliable. Usually either you praise the place (5 stars) or you tank it (0 stars). But life is not either black or white. There is a LOT of gray in between. I believe that apart from the “avoid this place at all cost” kind of rating, the ratings themselves are useless. Only the comments can have some kind of meaning and those are not structured, missing valuable information also for the side of the owner that might be able to use them to improve the business. But at this points (that the 1 star made it to the review) it might be already too late.

PS

I decided to give them a good rating, because in the end, it doesn’t even matter.