I think this is what you are talking abot Val

Tennessee hotel sues TripAdvisor for being declared 'dirtiest in US'
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travelnews/8841579/Tennessee-hotel-sues-TripAdvisor-for-being-declared-dirtiest-in-US.html

Graham

Val
I didn't see the program but from what I have read in the papers recently a lot of UK Hotel/B&B owners are upset about what they think are unfair reviews on TA.
There is a program next Monday on Channel 4 that deals with this.http://tv.sky.com/tv-guide#/programme/detail/1621/48335

I heard on the radio last week that alleged a lot of the reports on TA were bogus and could be either favourable or negative. I always read a lot and try to come to a consensus of opinion.

the bit that I like is that although the TA report says they are the dirtiest, in the overall "league table" there are 4 worse!!

The second biggest problem with TA (the first being that they are owned by a travel company) is that it is too big and they can't keep track of what's going on so they are reliant on people reporting issues to them, and if they don't get reported they might not get fixed. We (HT and I) had an issue with a report last night, various of us reported it and it's been deleted within a couple of hours. But if we hadn't reported it I suspect it would have been left even though it clearly broke their own rules. Although HT also has things reported by members the Mods do actively "patrol" the site looking for odd posts and even checking IP addresses.

Of course, if the various regional/ national tourist authorities were to do proper monitoring of properties and publish their results online visitors would have more to go on. My old local council started doing this with food sellers and it made a difference but after 2 years we had a local government reorg, the council was merged into a bigger authority and they don't bother.

Currently No.90 of 92 reviewed hotels the other 4 have no reviews as yet. The current rated No.92 has only had 4 reviews, and No. 91 has had 33 reviews. The Grand Resort has been reviewed 281 times and of those reviews 206 rated terrible and 29 rated poor.

So the league table is basically part based on number of visitors? A really bad place with 10 rooms and a few guests that don't survive may never get worse figures than one with 500 rooms.

Easy way to fix this, when your holiday is over, you request a ref no from the hotel, which you then have to enter into trip advisor or even here on holiday truths, so basicly you wont be able to review a hotel, which you havent stayed in, and any review done, could be answered by the hotel

Thats a good idea.I always try to give a balanced review but some people expect so much for their money they are totally unrealistic in their reviews.

Have to say if we look at reviews on a hotel we are going to stay at unless it gets bad review after bad review we just take it with a pinch of salt.
I have saw reviews on hotels that we have stayed in at the same time as the reviewer and we didnt think it was the same hotel.
People just complain about silly little things at times.

pool was too cold, children were too noisy

I always look at the dates the people travelled when you get lots of complaints about the same hotel.

Generally, if there are a few people travelling together - you find they all go on the site and all complain about the same thing so it makes it look like there were lots of problems when in fact it could be only a very small minority affected.

Best I've seen is when someone complained about the food at a longhaul destination resort (it was a wedding party) and about 20 relatives had all travelled out at the same time. You can imagine how it looked to the uninitiated

Shell
Limassol, Cyprus