Privacy, Taste, Preferences, & Relationships

Kara Holm
Jun 3, 2016
4 min read

Recently I was in Ottawa. I stayed at Swiss Hotel for three nights in May. How did I choose the hotel? I discovered the hotel on Expedia, I checked its location relative to my commitments on Google Maps and read the TripAdvisor reviews. And, as I have mentioned in a previous blog post (You Never Get a Second Chance to Make a First Impression), I like to have a suite when travelling for business so I have space to work. Swiss Hotel offered a very attractive-looking suite for the same price as a standard hotel room.

Swiss Hotel receives great reviews on TripAdvisor; but I did not love Swiss Hotel. This highlights one of the risks of relying on user reviews: so much is based on your personal expectations. The things that work for me might not work for someone else, which is why I try to provide very detailed reviews – so my readers know where I am coming from and then are able to decide if they want to listen to my comments, or not.

The British daily newspaper The Telegraph, as I have noted before, has a special focus on travel. As a result, there are always interesting articles about exotic destinations and travel packages that make me want to pack my bags and fly off to a yoga retreat in Turkey or visit the Atlas Mountains in Morocco during the festival of the roses. An article from February 28, 2015 contained analysis of a survey of this well-qualified Telegraph audience, asking for their assessment of the user-review travel site TripAdvisor.

When asked: “How many of the reviews on TripAdvisor do you believe are trustworthy?” 5 percent of respondents said “nearly all” (i.e. 95 percent or more), 40 percent of respondents said “the vast majority” (80 percent or more) and 35 percent said “most” (60 percent or more). In total 80 percent of respondents believe the reviews are reliable which is one of the reasons why TripAdvisor is so successful, as demonstrated by the fact that 95 percent of survey respondents check with TripAdvisor before booking.

One of the big issues that this survey was concerned with was authentication, which is to say: have the people submitting reviews actually stayed at the property? There are some concerns that reviews are planted by interested parties, who want to build their business’s reputation. My personal concern with user review sites like TripAdvisor, Chow Hound, Amazon, Yelp!, Expedia, and metacritic, is not whether or not the reviews are authentic. I am concerned that I may be drawn to a destination or a product or book or film that received a good review from someone with totally different priorities and tastes.

As I reported recently in a blog, this Telegraph survey found that customer service is the primary reason a property is given a poor score by reviewers. Perhaps conversely, in the instances where I have been dissatisfied, the issue has been not about service it has been about expectations or standards. Case in point: I was talking with an acquaintance about our visit to The Grand Hotel and Suites in Toronto in February. Readers may recall I was happy with the hotel. But in the spirit of demonstrating my theory that everyone has different priorities, my acquaintance, who also stayed at The Grand, called Expedia and asked to be moved to a different hotel, because she was not comfortable travelling with her family in the hotel’s neighbourhood. Our conversation reminded me that we all have different priorities. Swiss Hotel’s rooms were exactly as advertised, the service was very good, but I was expecting a boutique hotel and I landed in a place that felt like a pension writer John Irving might have imagined (minus the bear and eccentric long-term residents). The neighbourhood did not work for me, just as the Jarvis and Shuter Street location in Toronto did not work for my friend. It did not matter that the rooms were nice or that service was friendly at the Swiss Hotel: I did not want to ring a bell to get in the door, I did not want to leave my bags in the entry (please note I did not say “lobby”), I did not want to walk downstairs to find the desk, and I did not want to run the gauntlet of panhandlers every time I walked outside. It was the absence of information in this case that led to my dissatisfaction.

Recently, on Brent Bambury’s Day 6 (CBC Radio One) I heard Tom Vanderbilt, author of “You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice.” Mr Vanderbilt explained that a culture is emerging online where reviewers themselves are subject to review by the readers, creating a cross dialogue. He noted that TripAdvisor is shifting from a “wisdom of the crowd model, to the wisdom of friends model.” I understand this to mean that when I search on TripAdvisor they will curate the reviews that are presented to me, based on what they know about me. This makes sense: I do not mind sharing my personal data if businesses are using that information to give me a better experience.

Advice for the week:

Know your customers! (I can’t say this often enough.) You should know the basics: where they live, how old they are, how often they use your product or service, and how much they spend. But you should also be aware of their underlying motivations. Your customer group won’t be uniform but there will be dominant “tribes”. (Tribes is a term used by demographer Michael Adams to group individuals based on their beliefs.)
Know who you are too – and how you want to develop your relationship with your customers. The failure to do this is a mistake many businesses make. Successful businesses are clear on this point: you cannot be everything to everyone, so stake some territory and commit!

I am a big believer in developing psychographic profiles of your customers — so as better to serve them. The direction in which the user reviews are evolving seems to support this psychographic approach to understanding customers; an evolution I view as positive. Some of you might find it creepy, but from a business perspective there is real wisdom here, that predates the time when we were worried about privacy. Ultimately business is (and has always been) about relationships. Use that to your advantage.