Plus, Chris. Have you ever SEEN Tripadvisor? Bad reviews are NOT pushed down. NEW reviews push down OLD reviews. Hello??

no one should base their opinon on one bad review, particularly when many other postivie ones are available.

Agreed, though it can’t be helped there are such people who do that anyway. OTOH, and just one out of a gazillion possibilities, those people who cancel or so-called “research” around might also be potential headaches vendors won’t thankfully need to deal with.

Welcome to the Internet, where anyone can write anything about anybody and (usually) not be held liable for what might turn out to be unrealistically untrue and/or unreasonable. Fortunately (and kudos to some of the posters here) there are some options how to handle that otherwise irritating issue.

And yes, a business can forbid audio or video recording on its property. The First Amendment is not a license for you to do whatever the *$#!$ you want under the rubric of Free Speech.

@JoeFarrell: I’m sure you like things just the way you do – and that’s fine – but understand that from a hotel’s standpoint, it’s difficult to prepare a room for a specific individual’s tastes very far in advance. You have, say, a reservation to check in on Friday. The hotel knows not whether you will be there at 2 PM, 5 PM, or 9 PM – or if in fact you may end up cancelling completely. In the meantime, other guests are arriving, and may make conflicting requests – a group arrives and wants four rooms, preferably close together. The only block of four includes the room the hotel might, in theory, have set aside for you, with the supply of extra towels. They might set aside a room and when you arrive, you realize the hotel faces a stunning set of mountains and you request a room with a view – except the room they’d pre-stocked is on the other side of the building.

For many such reasons, hotels generally will honor special requests, but wait until a guest actually shows up before starting. Of course that’s not the case when you’re paying $1,500 a night for a room or $2,500 for a suite in a really high-end property, but I doubt those complaints apply in such a case anyway.

The reason you have to ask every day for certain things is that (in my experience) hotels do not provide ongoing communication between the front desk/reservation staff and those responsible for amenities, like the housekeepers, sometimes for good reason, It wouldn’t be uncommon for a list of room requests appended to the housekeeping cart (put 2 extra sets of towels in room 112 Tuesday through Thursday this week) to be ignored because nobody on the housekeeping team could read English.

And in their efforts to cut costs (to manage debt loads from overextending themselves on acquisitions and building), hotels don’t have the staff to check the towel bin at the pool every 30 minutes. Perhaps they should, but it’s not likely that the staff doesn’t care; it’s that Rosario has 14 rooms to clean between 9 AM and 3 PM and she can’t stop every 30 minutes to see if a bunch of teenagers have used one towel each to dry off, another one to lay out on by the pool, and a third dry one to carry their clothes up to their room in.

@Kathleen Eaton, I heartily agree with your opening comment wher you describe the “Groundswell” effect social media has had on empowering consumers. It’s very important.

Oh well, the business should have tried harder to please them, and it is highly unlikely anyone without a legitimate beef would go to such extremes.

Finally let me say in this economy, businesses should WORSHIP all consumers, and really are not in ANY position to sue any consumer for a bad review, lest they risk a consumer JIHAD backlash against them for daring to attack people that give them their livelihoods.

That practice is an illegal violation of the First Amendment. Public postings on the internet are protected free speech. They are not libel as long as they are truthful and factually based. That being said, have witnesses or receipts ready if you have any reason to believe the business is stupid enough to sue you.

The frivolous lawsuit filed against the Yelper in San Fran just encourages all of us to shove video cameras, cell phone photo snappers, and pocket audio recorders in retail employees and managers faces to protect ourselves from lawsuits…”Hold on, shut up until I hit record…now, repeat that horrendous thing you said?”

On the other hand, they then cannot also forbid us from recording things on their property where they invite business – they can’t have it both ways.

For example, a certain Vegas property that I have visited did not have an in room safe and I read about it even in good reviews. It almost influenced my decision but I found out they had plenty of secure lockboxes available. Other bad reviews though for another property focused on location rather than the actual property and once discounted, the good reviews easily outweighed the bad.

It would be good for sites that allow reviews to also also allow property/business owners to state a rebuttal. In my experience it is even easier to weed out the bad places because they often attack the original poster instead of just stating facts and letting people draw their own conclusions.

I have high standards – I’m willing to pay for them. When I go on vacation and spend good money I want to get value for what I spend and for what you promise. When I’m on vacation I don’t want anything to bother me – can’t you just have my special requests in my room when I get there? Why do I have to ask three times and bitch about extra towels? Why if I ask for a minor thing, I have to ask for it over and over again and every single day? If you have a pool and hot tub, and provide towels, how about making sure you HAVE towels available, instead of forcing m to tell you the towel bin is empty? How hard is it to do you job as a hotel?

You KNOW room 522 has no air conditioning. Its July. Don’t give it to people. Is it just a minor amusement to you? I do NOT want to worry about complaining on my vacation – I complain for a living- I do not want a busman’s holiday. You do your end, I’ll do mine and not bother you.

It should be much like community conversation. When you ask for people’s opinions or hear them, you try to get as many inputs as possible, look for patterns and consider exactly what is said. Years ago, I wanted to rent an apartment in a large city and knew very little about well managed buildings vs. poorly managed buildings. It was important to me to NOT have to deal with sloppy or ineffective management.

I went online and read reviews written by tenants. Yes, I read scathing reviews and very flattering reviews but the building I eventually chose had a preponderance of excellent reviews that were very specific and the few angry reviews could easily have been caused by either an unreasonable tenant or an unreasonable employee reaction that didn’t resolve well. My guide was the overall conversation about that building and the types of comments I read about other buildings. Turned out my choice was very satisfactory. I don’t look for a perfect business with a perfect review record. Usually I want to know how that business handles problems that arise and that they do handle them.

One negative impact of shutting down information is doctor reviews. Years ago when online registries first appeared, it was comforting to be able to look up a physician and find out where he or she attended medical school, how long in practice, etc. That information is much harder to get now and its curious. Also the registries on line don’t always contain up-to-date information so I rarely bother using them. Still, its a puzzle as to why that information was/is threatening to have out there. Calling a doctor’s office and asking where the MD went to medical school, etc. is often give as advice but in practice, the person answering the phone and getting such a question quickly becomes very defensive and even unwilling to provide the information. Have just never understood it….but do understand that as a consumer, I need someplace to go to find out what other consumer experiences have been.

A very, very good house painter, upon learning of the existence of Angie’s List became very upset about it. Years before he had had a difficult experience with a customer and was convinced that that experience, if publicized, would ruin his buisness. He was dead-set against allowing consumers to express an opinion for that reason. ???

I also look at where the poster is from. Americans tend to complain about small rooms in Europe. Well, rooms are smaller in Europe than in the US. That’s not a valid complaint. Similiarly I’ve seen European posters complain about the fact that everyone seems to want a top. Again, usually not a valid complaint about a US property.

But after a while, you tend to get a feel for the truth

(Take a look at the reviews for movies and games on metacritic.com, for example. Almost all user reviews are either ’10′s or ’0′s. Almost no one ever scores items in-between the extremes.)

If I can’t find a ‘level headed’ opinion (on anything) while skimming, I try to keep track of how many ‘bad’ reviews. One or two, I’m thinking a whiner wrote it. More than a few bad reviews, however, and the spidey senses go off.

Also, are the negative reviews based on actual experiences at the hotel, or those circumstances beyond the hotel’s control? For instance, several reviewers have given negative reviews to hotels in Nashville, Tenn. that are near the airport, because of the noise. Well, duh! It’s an airport!! These large, loud machines called jets fly in at a low altitude so they can land! Again, while this may be annoying, is it the hotel’s fault? It might be worth a mention as a caveat, but should not merit a wholly negative review.

So when people look at negative reviews, they need to put on their critical thinking hats and look for similarities, and for real problems — not merely artifically high expectations that weren’t met.