Then they ought to be more adept than the silly-sounding new reviewers who popped up to proclaim this random Embassy Suites in a random corner of Oklahoma "the best hotel in the world."

i would actually be very surprised if the big hotel chains had organized teams filing fraudulent reviews. The risk of discovery would far outweigh potential rewards.

And like any social-platform review resource (Yelp, Angie's List, Skytrax, etc.) TripAdvisor is at least 50 percent nonsense. There's some useful stuff but the unmoderated approach really hurts; so do lingering suspicions that the playing field is knocked askew by fake rave reviews, negative ones being yanked, or sponsor influence. Yelp, though, is even more suspect in this regard -- with floods of reports of merchants/restauranteurs/etc. seeing positive ratings disappear unless they buy Yelp advertising.