fake reviews on hostel world

Sorry for being repetative then. I looked but somehow missed these topics. I don't need to have their IP address as this person was stupid enough to log in using real name as their nickname. And as it happens I know them as they used to work for me before they changed jobs. It's just so petty that I cannot let it go.

Here's one of the other threads about the IP address issue:
http://www.hostelmanagement.com/forums/tripadvisor-reviews.html

A list of ideas for booking engines:

• ban all reviews from anonymous proxies
• Use the IP addresses to compare the city that the property was booked in with the city where the review was written. If the hostel is in London and an unusual number of bookings and reviews all come from inside London, it should flag it for manual review.
• Compare names and billing addresses of credit cards. If someone has made three 1-night bookings for a single hostel in a 6-month review period on their credit cards, flag it for human review. In many/most cases repeat visitors to a hostel won't book all their stays on HW, but will typically book the additional stays through the hostel.
• Scenario: low-rated hostel tells their employees to make bookings on their credit cards and then reimburses them. It could be tracked with something like this: If (7 of the last 10 reviews written from the property's IP C-block) are significantly different from (7 of the last 10 reviews written outside the property's city) then flag the hostel for manual review.
• To track people doing the same outside of the hostel's computer network: If (7 of the last 10 reviews written from within 100 miles of the hostel) are significantly different from (7 of the last 10 reviews written outside 100 miles of the hostel) then flag the hostel for manual review.
• for hostels using BPO, don't send review email if the guest doesn't check-in
• look for other patterns based on complaints from hostels

Maybe they already do these things, but if not, it should reduce the problem. Hostel managers would still try to game the system, but they would just be wasting their money because they wouldn't get the review emails.

The booking engines could even apply the algorithm to last season's reviews and see which hostels are trying to game the system. :)

At a complete guess it seems to be more common in Eastern Europe

Yes, because most hostels there are pretty small, hence do not get many reviews, hence there is a big effect of a few fake 100% ratings.

If you own one of those 120 small hostels in Budapest, you can only sell beds through HW if your ratings are extremely good or your beds are extremely cheap or if you use unconventional marketing strategies like Aboriginal.

In Munich, there are only 11 hostels, the smallest one with 200 beds. Some of them have hundreds of ratings, ours even more than 1000. You would have to submit dozens of fake ratings to see any effect at all.
Those without hundreds of ratings are the ones which don´t care about HW anyway - they sell most of their beds to school groups.

I dont think hostelworld wants to change, because the overrated hostels (with fake reviews) belongs to the friends of hostelworld's buddies.
I sent to them a part of the proofs about fake ratings and they used the best method : Have not replied for weeks, for months.
I think the best to send the all material to the irish police and tax office to Dublin.
Very clear cheating, look for example Budapest 1/3 of the 120 small hostel have higher rating than 90%++ for ages and hostelworld have not done nothing.:confused: