Dirty rooms, unlucky pigeons, and bribery

A few months back TripAdvisor launched a company blog on the Typepad platform.

Thankfully the blog isn’t a collection of gushing pieces of self-promotion, but rather a light-hearted effort, used mainly to ridicule reviewers and stroppy managers of hotels – reproduced anonymously, of course.

We’ve had a quick trawl though again recently and picked out some of the good ones (copied, with grammatical errors, from emails received at TripAdvisor HQ in the US).

From an upset hotelier:

“We never rent out dirty rooms, I do not think that anyone in motel business would do something like that. However, sometimes (almost never) the housekeeping could forget to clean a room and it could get rented out...”

From a reviewer:

“Our only complaint about the [hotel name removed] thus far, is that each day early in the morning and in the afternoon when we take a nap, all we seem to hear is what sounds like the sodomizing of the parrots in the lobby 8 floors below us - very annoying.”

From another irate hotel owner:

“I don't give the authorization to pubblicate the "user reviews" and my question is if it is possible to remove/cancel the "user reviews" bad and good regarding us.

“So I would like to know if you can make this for me or in an other way I can do that.

“If you are so kindly to do this for me I will send you by ordinary mail a big bottle of our original lemon likoer of the Amalfi Coast called ‘limoncello’.”

The TripAdvisor team responded quickly to the last 'request': “For the record: We didn't take him up on this. We don't do bribes. Though if anyone out there wants to send us big bottles of liquor with no strings attached, we will make the Owl [the name for the TripAdvisor blogger] write you a very nice thank-you note.”

Kevin May, editor, Travolution