More than £28 billion is being wasted each year by Brits who place blind faith in anonymous internet recommendations when booking holidays and meals out. Despite investing large amounts of money and time in online research before they book, many people are trusting comments on web sites and rather than seeking opinions from people they know, according to research out today.
The survey of 2,000 people carried out by new friends’ recommendation site, LoveThis.com, which launched today, revealed that more than a third of all dining and holiday experiences in Britain are a disappointment. This means the average household is spending £1,080 annually on substandard time off or eating out. And the average Brit spends more than five hours online researching each holiday and 90 minutes finding restaurants to book – which in some cases is more than the actual time spent eating.
Trust is clearly a growing issue for people who use all forms of media for help, advice and recommendations. In the survey, 40 per cent of people said they now don’t trust official guides and expert recommendations, while 34 per cent said the same about review sites. Almost 50 per cent don’t trust newspapers and magazines. The best advice comes from friends and family, with 61 per cent saying word-of-mouth powered better recommendations.
“We wouldn’t ask a random person in the street where to go on holiday, so why are we prepared to trust anonymous reviews online? We are wasting large amounts of our time and money. We should be using the internet to ask friends we trust, rather than strangers we don’t,” said LoveThis founder Alexis Dormandy.
“Britain is overwhelmed by misleading internet recommendations that steer us into poor choices of holidays and meals. Some people are waking up to this. LoveThis is aiming to put that right by filtering all the mediocrity out there, enabling genuine friends to share their personal recommendations with other friends. Whether it is a restaurant, a book or a builder, LoveThis helps you find the best things, from the people you trust.,” he said.
Once signed up to LoveThis, people can build their own profile of ‘loves’ and connect to existing friends through their email and social networks like Facebook and Twitter - adding #LoveThis to your tweets automatically adds the recommendation to your profile, for example. People can make recommendations on anything they want to, via their phones or a computer, and tag them to make them easily searchable by friends.
