Is IHG surpressing negative reviews on its website?

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IHG, the parent of Holiday Inn, Crowne Plaza, InterContinental etc, publishes traveller reviews on its website for each of its hotels.

For some time there have been rumblings on Flyertalk about bad reviews mysteriously disappearing after being submitted.

A couple of weeks ago, I had a HfP reader contact me. He had stayed at the new – well, rebadged from Kensington Close Hotel – Holiday Inn Kensington High Street.

My understanding is that this hotel – room photo below, although I believe refurbishment is underway – could not be more of a dog if it had four legs and barked. (I told this to an IHG executive at Christmas, this comment will not surprise them.) It still averages 3.9 out of 5, however, from reader reviews.

According to our reader:

I had a terrible stay at the Kensington High Street HI and wrote a suitably scathing review once the automated system asked for it after my stay. They then deleted it. Refused to publish it. Refused to send it back to me. Just want the whole thing to “disappear”. They deny it is censorship, but can’t find an alternative word to describe their actions. I am escalating a complaint with them that they cannot do this and have to take the bad with the good if they host a review service. It is is very dishonest practice to delete the bad ones and just leave the good reviews.

One Flyertalker, who submits regular reviews, stated that he never grades below a ‘3’ because that is likely to see the review disappear. His own grading of rankings is:

Overall score of 4.6 is great
Overall score of 4.3-4.5 is ‘nothing special’
Overall score of 4.0-4.2 is ‘hit or miss’
Overall score of 3.9 or below is ‘avoid at any cost’

On this scale, the Holiday Inn Kensington High Street is correctly positioned – it averages ‘3.9 or below’ – but the casual reader of ihg.com may not see it that way.

Another Flyertalk member submitted a positive review of a property but did mention that it had bedbugs. He got the following response:

Your review has been rejected.

As a valued guest, your concerns are of the utmost priority. Therefore, rather than posting your review, we have alerted our Customer Care Team. One of our agents will be reaching out to you immediately. We apologize for the experience you had at our hotel, and thank you for bringing it to our attention.

Here is a report from a Flyertalk reader who wrote two reviews back to back:

Holiday Inn – Birmingham – 1 star Review (IMO) – Still Pending 2 days.
Staybridge Suites Birmingham – 5 Star Review Submitted 10:45 – Approved and Live 14:00

It isn’t certain that IHG is filtering out bad reviews from its website. You don’t need to be a sceptic, however, to believe that you shouldn’t take everything that appears on a corporate website with a grain of salt.

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This article is closed to new posts. Discussion continues in the HfP Forums.

Mr Dee says:

29 Apr29 April 09:07

Posted a review of a HIX about how the room had not been cleaned and that the bed sheets and pillows were dirty, initially the review got declined due to promoting other hotel brands which I did not at all. I then made it a lot shorter and this review got accepted, I then had their customer service contact me and the manager actually phoned to offer a refund which was a surprise.

Yes I think that the reviews are hard to get accepted sometimes but usually their follow up makes up for this in my experience. I am not sure if these bad reviews disappear overtime though.

Trip advisor has been ok but sometimes they seem to hold back negative reviews and don’t publish them as quick as positive ones.

None of these sites are as bad as thebestof directory that won’t accept anything under 3 stars and all their listings are positive, that directory is pretty useless for reviews in any area.
SL says:

29 Apr29 April 09:12

The same happened to me for a review I wrote on Crowne Plaza Stratford upon Avon. It was rejected due to “another hotel brand been mentioned” which is not true. When I took that up to IHG Rewards Club, guest relation quoted the very same wording above stating the hotel would come back to me directly with a rather surprising subject “Guest Reviews_Legal Review required”. One week on, I have heard nothing back.
DJ says:

29 Apr29 April 09:27

As a Spire IHG member, I stay regularly and I’m mostly happy with my stays at IHG hotels. However, I stayed at the Staybridge Suites Times Square and it was awful. My review said as much, but somehow this hotel continues to get rave reviews. Difficult to see how this can happen.
zsalya says:

29 Apr29 April 09:34

I am not surprised about own-site reviews
The temptation for filtering is so obvious that I would never expect them to be unbiased.
The same is true for online own-brand shops.

TripAdvisor is more concerning – one can see why they may be under commercial pressure re advertising, but I have assumed so far that they regarded their reputation as too important.
Similarly for Amazon.

eBay has a slightly different problem (just contrast typical ratings on eBay (99%+) with typical ratings on Amazon Marketplace (many lower)) – because the platform penalises sellers with less than ?4.9, sellers are desperate to fix problems so one does not leave anything negative – as a result scores don’t tell one much, but problems do get compensated.
NFH says:

29 Apr29 April 10:19

I suggest that removing bad reviews while leaving good reviews, which are then misleadingly presented as the totality of reviews, could be a breach of Regulations 5 and/or 6 of the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008. Regulation 5 governs misleading actions and Regulation 6 governs misleading omissions. This could be worth reporting en-masse to Trading Standards to prompt an investigation. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2008/1277/contents/made
- Sam Wardill says:
  
  29 Apr29 April 16:49
  
  I would if I thought Trading Standards would do anything. Unfortunately they are seriously underfunded and have bigger fish to fry
  - Mark says:
    
    29 Apr29 April 23:00
    
    Would also be something that the Advertising Standards Authority may want to look at (they cover websites).
    
    Unlikley to make a major impact but worth a shot.
- Talay says:
  
  1 May1 May 22:54
  
  As a fairly litigious sort of person, I believe I would probably sue if I had evidence a hotel chain was deleting poor reviews and thus displaying a biased appraisal of their property which directly enticed me to book to stay with them.
  
  Probably only a money claim (MCOL) in the UK but I’d relish them attempting to conjour up a response to get out of jail without letting the cat out of the bag.
  
  If we don’t fight back, they’ll do it every time.
Doug says:

29 Apr29 April 10:24

I submitted a negative review on hotels com, where I have gold status for whatever that might be worth. Didn’t get posted. Contacted them and said it was completely honest, why not post? Some general rubbish response, It was eventually posted but a considerable time later than my generally positive reviews are. As someone above said you need to read the out of step ones. The whole rating system is flawed, when you rate a HI Express are you rating against a common standard, or against what you’d expect from a HIE?
- Leo says:
  
  29 Apr29 April 12:55
  
  Well that’s the question behind the question. When I rate hotels I rate on my level of satisfaction within my expectations – it’s entirely subjective. If an IC is mediocre I will say so and give it a 2. If I think a HI was excellent I’ll give it a 5. I try to rate a hotel within its own category as it were. But you are right – I have no idea how people rate hotels on either hotel sites or TA as in what is the standard they are using. I do get really cross when someone will give a 1 star review on TA because of a particular thing which went wrong during a stay without being objective about everything else at the hotel.
  - Barry cutters says:
    
    30 Apr30 April 00:59
    
    I was looking st one the other day and someone gave a hotel in Mexico 1* because they had a 14h delay on flight
Mark says:

29 Apr29 April 10:31

Do they give you the option of opting out of making your feedback public? This seems important to me if they’re rigging the site.

Maybe worth submitting all reviews as 1 star (regardless of content) until it’s resolved?
Mark says:

29 Apr29 April 11:04

Post review on Tripadvisor, and state that your review on IHG has been deleted. Im certain most hotels look at TA as well, and it would doubly piss them off to find that they have been called out.
- James A says:
  
  29 Apr29 April 14:31
  
  I’ve had a tripadvisor review deleted after being ‘contested by the hotel’ too. Most specifically, the Le Meridien Limassol.
  - ASa says:
    
    30 Apr30 April 19:17
    
    I’ve had the same on TA with an IHG hotel. Gave up arguing with TA eventually but it’s definitely made me more wary of overall ratings for hotels