How consumer reviews deceive you

Much retailing now involves consumer reviews.

- By J. MANUEL GONZALEZ

Yet most consumer-review systems are fatally misleading.

No purchase verification. On TripAdvisor, *anyone with an email can review any establishment* without verification. TripAdvisor claims it can detect bulk fabrication, but it has no safeguards against a few people opening 20 email accounts with which to plant 20 false reviews, enough to destroy or boost most restaurants.

“Readers’ Choice” awards are no better. A well-known magazine once named my hotel one of “Asia’s 25 Best Resorts,” a distinction easily worth hundreds of thousands. A jealous competitor only needed to invest $100 for a few subscriptions through which to submit false reviews the following year. At the rarefied Best 25 level, very few negative reviews were needed to nudge us off the list.

Reviewer qualification. For a useful review about a restaurant in London, would you believe someone whose only previous review was of a Jollibee, or an experienced diner with reviews in many cities and countries? Yet every review system practices this foolish form of democracy, giving equal votes to everyone without considering past experience or diligence in reviewing.

The Michelin irrelevance pitfall. Michelin operates an “expert rating” system. Anonymous reviewers judge restaurant food (not service, not ambience). Except they don’t. I have patronized literally hundreds of Michelin-starred restaurants around the world, from French Laundry to Maaemo to Odette (see https://plantationbay. com/dining/restaurants), and think it’s at best Hit-or-Miss. Michelin reviewers seem obsessed with “prettiness” and “strangeness,” but ignore the qualities that diners really care about — taste, memorability, repeatability. “Did I enjoy eating this? One week after, can I still remember it? Do I want to eat it again in this lifetime?” Michelin doesn’t seem to care, so long as it looks “creative.”