Is IHG surpressing negative reviews on its website?

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• Mr Dee says:

  29 Apr29 April 09:07

  Posted a review of a HIX about how the room had not been cleaned and that the bed sheets and pillows were dirty, initially the review got declined due to promoting other hotel brands which I did not at all. I then made it a lot shorter and this review got accepted, I then had their customer service contact me and the manager actually phoned to offer a refund which was a surprise.

  Yes I think that the reviews are hard to get accepted sometimes but usually their follow up makes up for this in my experience. I am not sure if these bad reviews disappear overtime though.

  Trip advisor has been ok but sometimes they seem to hold back negative reviews and don’t publish them as quick as positive ones.

  None of these sites are as bad as thebestof directory that won’t accept anything under 3 stars and all their listings are positive, that directory is pretty useless for reviews in any area.

• SL says:

  29 Apr29 April 09:12

  The same happened to me for a review I wrote on Crowne Plaza Stratford upon Avon. It was rejected due to “another hotel brand been mentioned” which is not true. When I took that up to IHG Rewards Club, guest relation quoted the very same wording above stating the hotel would come back to me directly with a rather surprising subject “Guest Reviews_Legal Review required”. One week on, I have heard nothing back.

• DJ says:

  29 Apr29 April 09:27

  As a Spire IHG member, I stay regularly and I’m mostly happy with my stays at IHG hotels. However, I stayed at the Staybridge Suites Times Square and it was awful. My review said as much, but somehow this hotel continues to get rave reviews. Difficult to see how this can happen.

• zsalya says:

  29 Apr29 April 09:34

  I am not surprised about own-site reviews
  The temptation for filtering is so obvious that I would never expect them to be unbiased.
  The same is true for online own-brand shops.

  TripAdvisor is more concerning – one can see why they may be under commercial pressure re advertising, but I have assumed so far that they regarded their reputation as too important.
  Similarly for Amazon.

  eBay has a slightly different problem (just contrast typical ratings on eBay (99%+) with typical ratings on Amazon Marketplace (many lower)) – because the platform penalises sellers with less than ?4.9, sellers are desperate to fix problems so one does not leave anything negative – as a result scores don’t tell one much, but problems do get compensated.

• Doug says:

  29 Apr29 April 10:24

  I submitted a negative review on hotels com, where I have gold status for whatever that might be worth. Didn’t get posted. Contacted them and said it was completely honest, why not post? Some general rubbish response, It was eventually posted but a considerable time later than my generally positive reviews are. As someone above said you need to read the out of step ones. The whole rating system is flawed, when you rate a HI Express are you rating against a common standard, or against what you’d expect from a HIE?

  • Leo says:

    29 Apr29 April 12:55

    Well that’s the question behind the question. When I rate hotels I rate on my level of satisfaction within my expectations – it’s entirely subjective. If an IC is mediocre I will say so and give it a 2. If I think a HI was excellent I’ll give it a 5. I try to rate a hotel within its own category as it were. But you are right – I have no idea how people rate hotels on either hotel sites or TA as in what is the standard they are using. I do get really cross when someone will give a 1 star review on TA because of a particular thing which went wrong during a stay without being objective about everything else at the hotel.

    • Barry cutters says:

      30 Apr30 April 00:59

      I was looking st one the other day and someone gave a hotel in Mexico 1* because they had a 14h delay on flight

• Mark says:

  29 Apr29 April 10:31

  Do they give you the option of opting out of making your feedback public? This seems important to me if they’re rigging the site.

  Maybe worth submitting all reviews as 1 star (regardless of content) until it’s resolved?

• Mark says:

  29 Apr29 April 11:04

  Post review on Tripadvisor, and state that your review on IHG has been deleted. Im certain most hotels look at TA as well, and it would doubly piss them off to find that they have been called out.

  • James A says:

    29 Apr29 April 14:31

    I’ve had a tripadvisor review deleted after being ‘contested by the hotel’ too. Most specifically, the Le Meridien Limassol.

    • ASa says:

      30 Apr30 April 19:17

      I’ve had the same on TA with an IHG hotel. Gave up arguing with TA eventually but it’s definitely made me more wary of overall ratings for hotels

• JamesW says:

  29 Apr29 April 11:08

  Always copy your review to TripAdvisor too.

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