Beware Fake Restaurant Reviews: Restaurant Wars Go Online—And Get Dirty

Buyers research their purchases online now, more than ever before. Often consumers will log on to a restaurant to find their prices, menu and ultimately their reviews. Restaurant reviewers used to be a select group of professionals who were feared by chefs and restaurant owners world wide. Now with the Internet, reviews can be written online by anyone! This means you can not believe every review you read.

With the price of dining out continually increasing, you want to know you are going to have a dinning experience that is worth your money, which is why most people check out online reviews before stepping into a restaurant.

General Manager of Menulog, Australia’s most comprehensive dining guide, Gary Munitz, says before making a decision based on one bad review keep in mind that the online review could in fact be a fake.

“Online dining guides can be very useful, and checking the reviews ahead of time can be a wonderful way to make sure that your restaurant experience is a good one. But it’s best to be aware of the potential for restaurants going online to trash their competitors,” said Munitz. “At Menulog, we have an extensive vetting system to keep the reviews as accurate as possible. As restaurants get more web-savvy, we have had to step up our efforts in quality control, especially in 2009.”

With so many restaurants to choose from now it does matter whether you receive a five star rating or a one star rating. With so much riding on good reviews it is a temptation for a restaurant owner to create phony reviews to bash their competition.

Keep an eye out for bogus tales of rats, bugs in salads and flies in the soup!

Here are Menulog’s top five tips to ensure you are reading the ‘real deal’:

1. Make sure the dining guide has a vetting process. The guide should have standards for submission and be active in preventing abuse.

2. If you see a poor review, look to see how many other reviews that individual has written. Did somebody write a scathing review of a restaurant, but it’s the only one they have ever done? That may be a red flag.

3. Look to see how many reviews the restaurant has overall. It’s probably still a good bet to visit a restaurant that has only one poor review and twenty good ones.

4. Consider the content of the review itself. If it sounds too outrageous to be true, then it probably is.

5. Look at the date of the review. Restaurants frequently change owners and chefs, and a poor review written a year ago should carry less weight than a poor review written last week.

Before going to a restaurant do you look up their menu and reviews online?

Does a good review encourage you to go to a restaurant?

If you hear a bad review about a restaurant will you not go there?

Have you ever written a review about a restaurant?

If one of your favourite restaurants receives a bad review will you stop going there?

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