Do OTAs own guest reviews about your properties?

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Podobovenko
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Joined: Tue Dec 10, 2013 7:48 am
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Post by Podobovenko »

why I ask is:
property owners from Lviv, Ukraine want to crowndund and make national booking portal. I'm think of making a web-scraping tool to collect property reviews automatically from different sites and put the to appropriate apartments.
Looks like if we say in our t&c "we don't know where do these reviews come from and take no responsibility..." would be nice
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Ben McNevis
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Post by Ben McNevis »

Your question makes a lot more sense now.

Your plan with reviews: you might get away with it but is not ethical. If you start an enterprise in an unethical way, it will only get worse when you face difficulties and eventually your bad reputation will harm your enterprise.

A perfectly legal and open way to show the reviews is to link to the relevant TripAdvisor or BC pages. You might fear that customers will go there to book, but you need to give them a good reason to come back to the owner or yourselves to book.

There are other alternatives where the legal and ethical position is not so clear: if you show the review pages from other sites in an iframe, you can effectively crop the page to limit how much you show. It's just an idea and I really think it might be better to do it in a more open way.

Best of luck!
Cheers, Ben
www . scotland-cottage.com www . scottish-cottage.com


Visiting Glenrothes? It's one of your Fife-a-day
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Podobovenko
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Joined: Tue Dec 10, 2013 7:48 am
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Post by Podobovenko »

Actually, I still doubt it is ethical to prohibit me using my reviews. I sent official question to booking rep. We'll see what they say.
But generally you're right: reputation is everything
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