What lessons can we learn from TripAdvisor?

Where did it all go wrong? More importantly for social care in the UK where could it all go wrong for us, and why are we copying this broken model?

 TripAdvisor was an enormous success the perfect answer to the classic prisoners dilemma – a platform where hotels can prove to their potential customers that they can be trusted, and that they do offer value for money etc., It works for eBay, so why not?

Anyone who watched the Panorama programme will tell you what went wrong, basically people started trying to game the system, managers and owners leaving blatantly glowing feedback about their own hotels and then customers using the site to bash the hotels and spoil their reputations.

Social care in the UK is not so different from the hotel industry and most of the review websites in the sector are copying the broken TripAdvisor model. As Albert Einstein said “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

The lesson to be learned from TripAdvisor, is don’t copy it!

The smart ones amongst us are not copying this broken model, we are giving new models a chance, because we see the benefits of solving the prisoners dilemma and we know that the collected experiences of all the industry’s customers or ‘friends and family’ as David Cameron puts it is the most reliable and most cost effective source of quality data available, if we can get access to this information it will prove to be the most valuable and important tool in improving the quality of social care in the UK for decades.

We will soon be adding our own care home review platforms to yourcarehome.co.uk please visit to keep updated.
 

Mark Sadler