oceane

What is the point of submitting online reviews if the parent company is cherry-picking them?

Stayed one miserable night at HIX Lithia Springs GA. Wrote two reviews so that female solo travelers would know this is not a safe area. Neither posted.

Where to go from here? Tripadvisor?

CalItalian

Posting reviews on IHG is worthless since they constantly edit & reject negative or in-depth reviews. Tripadvisor & Yelp are the top 2 places I post reviews.

bo1953

Sorry for your potentially 'unsafe' stay, yet I do not believe you do not know where else to post concerns about issues like this because the parent company only 'cherry picks' reviews.

While I Am sure many other company owned websites cherry pick reviews to post, and who can blame them, there are other sites where this is not the case.

Is your question, possibly, where can I post my concern without censorship or detailed review?

The answer is yet, of which several I Am sure you are familiar with, FT, TA, Yelp, etc.....

Hopefully your next trip to any hotel/motel will be in a 'safer' area.

Thank you for posting.

nicolas75

Reviews on Tripadvisor are pretty good.

What was exactly the problem?
What an hotel can do if the district is not that safe?
Have you talked with management about it?

bo1953

Yes, the OP neglected to indicate what the reason(s) she felt the area was unsafe.

Is this based on observation only, if so, what was observed?

Please enlighten your fellow FT'rs.

Hopefully your next hotel stop is a better one...

Dave Noble

Was this just a claim that it was unsafe or was there evidence in the review to prove that it is unsafe?

bubbashow

It is SHOCKING to me that anyone would think that it would be any different! The company owns the website which is essentially a marketing tool. It has no obligation (or expectation) to be impartial. It controls the site, it controls the message, and that's the way it should be. Use a third party site for a review. I apply this philosophy to my websites and my social media - it ain't a democracy.

notquiteaff

Well, then if you think it's shocking that anyone would not expect that, then it would seem plain ridiculous that IHG wouldn't think that, too... and come to the conclusion that it's a complete waste of time/space. Any all those people who submit positive reviews are essentially also wasting their time.

notquiteaff

As I see it, the OP didn't intend to post a review here and thus didn't neglect to include anything about the particular stay.

This thread is not about a particular stay, but rather about IHG not accepting negative reviews ("IHG won't post negative review")

Dave Noble

What was in the review is extremely relevent as to how reasonable the company was in choosing not to publish it.

The OP says that the review stated that the hotel is somehwere that is not safe - is that opinion or fact ? if the former, then doesn't seem unreasonable to choose not to publish it

notquiteaff

Safety is always relative and subjective. As are reviews in general.

Some people think the HIX "free" breakfast is good, others think it sucks. Just see this thread:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/inter...ntil-noon.html

If someone then writes a review and says "the breakfast was terrible", is that opinion or fact? And thus basis for calling it reasonable for IHG to kill the review?

Bowgie

I don't doubt IHG and other travel sites, including online travel agencies, edit and delete negative posts, which is why I chose not to post feedback on IHG even though my typical stay is usually a very positive experience.

As an example, I tried a restaurant (a parilla) around the corner from the Crown Plaza in Santiago last week, despite a very negative Google review from some idiot who forgot his backpack there and was offended that the money in the bag was missing the next day. So I made sure I didn't leave anything behind, and enjoyed an excellent steak.

IHG needs to give its customers enough credit to weed out the unreasonable negative reviews by stupid people. A justified negative review merits a "We promise to improve!" response from the hotel management.

IHG seems to want it both ways -- give us only the warm fuzzies, without any real give and take. Faked social media has no credibility and therefore no value.

Bowgie

I've seen complaints about every online forum, including the above two. No one is pure.

Dave Noble

If someone states something as fact without substantiation, then yes, I would say so

In that case, what was the problem with the breakfast and that the hotel wouldn't fix it would be reasonable to accept - but "Hotel breakfast at XYZ is terrible" not so

1StRanger

I actually think that most companies do that (with the reviews about themselves/their products), unfortunately. And that behavior stems from their incentives: they don't want "bad publicity".

The only company who I think hasn't been found guilty of removing bad reviews is Amazon. And that's because their business model realizes the strength and the value of negative reviews. But there is also a difference from the hotels is that Amazon is selling somebody's else products. Hotels sell their own "product" (service).

Even the "3rd-party" site, Yelp is guilty of hiding or deleting certain reviews, I don't know about TripAdvisor.


I agree with notquiteaff. The discussion of the actual review would digress from the main topic, regardless if what the review was based on: "solid" facts (and that is also subject to personal judgement for different people, hence the quotation marks) or "subjective" feelings and observations.

Moreover, I can easily see that some FTers would inevitably start judging the OP herself. And one of the indicators is already here: people want to know if those were facts or feelings. Hey, that really does not matter for the topic of the thread!
Even worse, I wouldn't be surprised if someone would start giving advice on how the OP should've behaved to avoid the situation. And that, besides being irrelevant, could also be unethical given the subject matter.

So, the OP poster was smart not posting the review or its details.