Expedia touts verified hotel reviews

By Harriet Baskas, msnbc.com contributor

Travelers considering using Expedia.com to book a room at the three-star Circus Circus Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas will find rates starting at $44 and descriptive copy promising ?newly remodeled? rooms and ?world-class circus acts.?

Sounds fun. But under the ?Guest Reviews? tab, potential guests will also find two recent reviews calling the hotel ?not the best? and ?more like average average.?

Could those write-ups be the handiwork of a couple of clowns from the competition down the road?

Not likely. At least not anymore.

In a move designed to make better use of its growing database of millions of traveler-generated hotel reviews and assure users that its reviews are not faked ??an issue other sites are dealing with ? Expedia has rolled out a new hotel booking platform with a revamped ?Expedia Verified Reviews? program.

The enhanced program allows travelers to filter hotel searches in new ways (for example, by proximity to a sports stadium) and confirms that each review ? good or bad ??was written by an Expedia customer who actually booked and stayed at that hotel.

With a new review form that rolled out last week, Expedia is also gathering more information.

?We?re starting to collect interest information,? said John Kim, Expedia?s senior vice president of global products. ?We get a lot of requests for reviews that would be useful for people with dogs or for hotels that would be good for foodies. The new form we send out after a hotel stay allows customers to write reviews for a specific audience.?

The verification process may narrow the pool of reviewers, Kim said, ?but we can get high quality, narrow content that is useful because we have so many users.?

Sites such as TripAdvisor, recently spun off from Expedia, that allow user reviews was a transformational travel achievement, said Bjorn Hanson, divisional dean of New York University?s Preston Robert Tisch Center for Hospitality, Tourism, and Sports Management. ?Now the idea of verified reviews is a major enhancement,? he said.

Hanson notes that verifying a review doesn?t prevent unfair or unreasonable reviews, but ?it does prevent the work of unscrupulous competitors and consumers unhappy with a prior experience with that brand from posting a baseless review.

?It doesn?t make TripAdvisor look bad,? said Hanson. ?It makes Expedia look like it?s advancing the state of the art, which is a competitive advantage.??

More on Overhead Bin

Find more by Harriet Baskas on?Stuck at The Airport.com?and follow her on?Twitter.

Source: http://overheadbin.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/12/28/9765956-expedia-touts-verified-hotel-reviews

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