Beware of Online Reviews and Comparisons

I spent all day flying home from Japan and ended up here before I left, thanks to the international date line. I thought about creating a travel comparison blog entry. Something with useful information like airlines with the most rude flight attendants or worst on-time performance. Then I realized that while I travel every single week, I often stick to the same airlines and don't experience the full breadth of companies offering services. That is partly because I have had poor experiences on some airlines and refuse to fly them ever again. I've even gone so far as to tell my company that I won't go on a trip because they insist on putting me on a carrier I refuse to fly. The more I thought about my seemingly objective travel blog, the more I realized I wouldn't be doing anyone a service. I just don't branch out and try all of the service providers for the travel industry.

When I got home this evening, I had a ski magazine waiting for me. Every year they publish a resort survey listing out the top ski resorts in North America. In years past they have used results from the survey to rank the ski resorts against each other. This can be misleading because it is really a popularity contests for the resorts and doesn't reflect which ones are actually the best, only the most visited. This year, the magazine just listed the resorts with short blurbs about each of them and left off the rankings. I think this is smart as I don't need a bunch of intermediate skiers raving about how great a place is because of expensive restaurants and raging parties. I want to know how the mountain skis and that had become overshadowed.

So what does all this have to do with technology? Well there are a lot of online reviews of goods and services. Some people are heavily influenced by those reviews. Great care should be taken when reading online recommendations. You have no way of knowing if the person writing the good review works for the company or the person writing the bad review had a poor experience and is trying to retaliate for an anomaly. So when you find yourself looking at reviews and rankings for products or services, ask yourself if the reviewer has valid points or not.