they’re lies and I can prove them, but TripAdvisor just won’t take them down."
And although all bad reviews aren’t fake, some customers are emboldened by the indirect medium, and tend to exaggerate.
“I had someone that said they waited at the door for five minutes, which is not appropriate anywhere, so the first thing I did was to check CCTV, and it was 32 seconds.”
He told us that a customer at a friend’s restaurant even admitted having given them a lower score because, although he’d enjoyed his own meal, he’d seen other negative reviews and decided to adjust his own.
The bottom line is that leaving poor reviews doesn't benefit anyone, and communicating privately would be much better.
“I understand that people don’t like confrontation and feel uncomfortable about complaining - I totally get that. But if they approached me directly with an email, I would give them a much more structured and measured respectful response.”
“I get wound up because I get wound up, I’m annoyed that I’m annoyed about it.”
Sadly, there’s no obvious solution to the problem - it has been suggested that customers should have to be able to prove that they’ve been to the restaurant, but then there’s always the issue of restaurants adding their own using receipts that customers left behind.
“The deep-rooted problem with it is that it’s giving everybody a voice, and not everybody deserves a voice as far as I’m concerned.”
Of the 20,000 people they’ve catered for at Salt over the past two years, they have only received between 12 and 15 bad reviews.
“But there’s a reason these get highlighted, because they stand out. They’re generally written by self-important people delivering opinion as fact.”
Thankfully, he said, newspaper critics “still hold so much power, which I think they should, because they generally have a very balanced view.”
The hope, he said, is that just like food bloggers, the TripAdvisor era is just a phase.
“Most bloggers were illiterate, and because there were so many, there were only a few good ones like Elizabeth on Food, Andy Hayes and The Critical Couple. They were really good reviews, they knew their subject, they were never just outright slating people or being horrible, but because there were so many of them they just diluted their market.
"I think hopefully it will bounce back and people will trust those reviewers again.”
“People argue that it’s one person’s opinion but it’s a measured, well educated view of somebody who knows that subject and is totally impartial.”
Written by Tanwen Dawn-Hiscox
