Hotel reviews, their influence and their limits

Last week, I was raising the question of the internet social media and their impact on hotels popularity. This week's article was written by Daniel Edward Craig in 2005, and similarly addresses the topic of the use of the internet by hotel customers and how it affects these establishments. Although the tone of the article is light, the topic remains an important one. Who has never had a look at hotel review websites in order to make a booking decision? Probably very few of us. Review websites such as Tripadvisor are powerful tools to support hotels' popularity but also to damage their image. D.E. Craig recounts how he found an anonymous and quite insulting review about himself - he is the general manager of a Canadian hotel, on one of those websites. The comment was very personal and gave no useful information to the future travellers, yet the review website refused to erase it. Is it common then to find such unhelpful comments? The answer is yes and the author of the article gives us his own classification of such websites' users. From the "uncle Bob" user to the "forensic examiner" we find out about numerous profiles, which I would qualify as parasite commentors. I actually agree with these profiles because anyone comes across them at some point. The question now is, what can hoteliers do to control these frequently unjustified comments?