A while back I thought I saw something like that going on so I looked into their system (just so see how it could be done, I would never do it for my hotel, honest!). What I found was that they verify the email address of the person posting the review, so unless a hotel wants to set up lots of fake identities and emails, wouldn’t it be difficult to manipulate ?

However, if by manipulate you mean hotels can encourage people to post reviews, then yes, I do that (I have a link to Tripadvisor and Wheretostay on my home page) and so do many others. Of course that does NOT mean you get great reviews, I have had the occasional really nasty negative review on Tripadvisor.

All in all though, as a hotelier I love review websites, as they let me see what people think of us… good and bad.