Being present on the Internet has become essential for bars and restaurants, be it on networks like Instagram or on search engines like Google. However, being online also exposes them to fake reviews, which account for no less than 55% of opinions. These are data from the NoFakes review certification platform, which, in addition to sanctioning unverified comments, has created a certification process based on the validation of a purchase ticket, in order to prove that it is a real customer. “Without a ticket, there is no review,” they explain.
The hospitality industry is one of the sectors most affected by false opinions, the company said in a statement: “Of all the fraudulent reviews that have been tried to register on the platform, 36% are related to bars and restaurants.”
The Twitter profile @Soycamarero, behind which is Jesús Soriano, has helped give visibility to this problem. Just a few months ago, the young bartender managed to make a fake review go viral. It was about a lady who criticized that the waiters of a restaurant did not serve her one afternoon because they wanted to close the premises earlier, information that was further disputed by the owner.
I wish it was an isolated case, but it is not. “The problem lies in the lack of control over who posts the review”, they affirm from NoFakes, that in order to avoid these false comments “that border on unreality” and put “the positioning and reputation of businesses at risk”, they will not allow users of your platform post comments without submitting the ticket. After implementing the measure, they found that 24% of the reviews of bars and restaurants are directly rejected by the algorithm.
They have also observed that many Internet users try to sneak in false tickets extracted from an image bank (12%), with an age that exceeds a year (13%), duplicates (14%) or with an impossible-to-define date (4%). The intent of some of these fake reviews, they explain, may be to increase a company’s reputation or hurt the competition, NoFakes notes.
To this solution, @SoyCamarero affirms, “it seems to me a brutal idea. It is something that all of us who work in this sector have been crying out for, since up to now anyone can review restaurants without even stepping foot in the premises, in many cases harming the work of others and distorting the establishment’s real score”.
As this measure is currently only implemented in the NoFakes app, if we use other review platforms and do not want to be fooled, experts advise to be wary of opinions with few details or to look at the profile of the reviewer. If the property is new and has a lot of reviews, they are also likely to be fake.
