World's dirtiest hotel? Are you for real?

This article was published in The Sydney Morning Herald 21 February 2011

Since it was founded in 2000, TripAdvisor.com has revolutionised the way people buy travel online by giving them access to reviews of accommodation providers around the world by other ordinary consumers.

TripAdvisor took buying hotel rooms out of the stone age where you had to rely on pot luck, the word of friends who had been there or a trusty old travel guide like Lonely Planet to strip away the advertising hype and give you a true rating.

But it has always been a leap of faith to trust that TripAdvisor's consumer reviews were the real thing. At first, there were allegations that hotels were manipulating the system by "planting" positive reviews to counteract the honesty of damning consumer opinions. Now the discussion is about whether the opposite is happening.