Imagine my suprise when I see the partial we8there.com webpage in full color on the front cover of the New York Times!!! 

Hotel Reviews Online: In Bed With Hope, Half-Truths and Hype
By CHRISTOPHER ELLIOTT
Business travelers like Michelle Madhok used to consider online hotel reviews a reliable reference.
Whenever she traveled to an unfamiliar city, Ms. Madhok said, she clicked on sites like TripAdvisor.com or IgoUgo.com, where she found thousands of ratings written by real guests.
Or so she thought.
Ms. Madhok, the president of the Internet shopping site Shefinds.com, said she was now becoming increasingly skeptical of what she saw online. "I read reviews of hotels that I've stayed at," she said. "And they're just wrong. I wonder if they've really stayed at the hotel."
On a recent visit to a spa in New York, she says, her doubts turned to disbelief: the resort was discreetly offering a free reflexology treatment to customers who posted a positive review of the establishment on Citysearch.com. "It was very troubling," she said.
As Web sites that publish guest hotel reviews become more influential, some hotels ? from bed-and-breakfasts to large resorts ? are going to greater lengths to ensure that their properties are rated highly. Their efforts, analysts say, range from encouraging guests to write flattering reviews to, in extreme cases, submitting bogus recommendations to Web sites.
The hotels justify their actions, the analysts say, as a counterweight to out-of-context rants by disgruntled guests; both sides are exploiting a new technology that lacks the safeguards of the traditional travel guidebooks, which are written by professional writers and edited for accuracy.
It was not always so. In the early days of hotel review sites on the Web, the Internet was a less diverse place, and the postings generally came from like-minded travelers, the experts say. But as more and more people are using the Internet to make travel decisions, there are more incentives, and opportunities, to manipulate reviews.
The major hotel chains deny that they try to influence online reviews in any way. But publishers at the most popular review Web sites say they have been inundated by fraudulent posts and have had to develop numerous measures to protect travelers.
Analysts and Web site operators say they fear that the effort is a losing battle. "Most sites can't catch a fake review," said Stanley E. Roberts, the chief executive of We8there.com, a lodging and dining review site.
Even so, Mr. Roberts says he reads every review before it is posted ? a laborious process that relies on instinct and experience. Still, he said, "I'm never sure if a fake is going to make it through."
The relentless efforts by hotels to influence their online ratings have made some review sites suspicious, if not paranoid. "We assume that every review we get is bogus, and it is bogus until proven otherwise," said Kenneth J. Marshall, who publishes HotelShark.com, a small hotel review site "We have to look for a reason to publish it." Indeed, more than half the reviews he receives do not make the cut, he said. As a result, only about 1,200 hotels are reviewed on his site.
IgoUgo.com, another ratings site, takes a different approach to ferreting out fraudulent write-ups. The guest commentaries it publishes are put into context, with detailed information about each reviewer, "so you can see exactly who is writing the review and if that person has similar travel needs to yourself," said Jim Donnelly, the site's vice president for marketing.
IgoUgo counts about 670 active business travelers in its membership. Their postings are also monitored by editors as an extra precaution.
TripAdvisor, which is owned by Expedia, is perhaps the best known of the hotel ratings sites and proclaims it is the largest, with more than three million reader reviews. It is so concerned with review fraud that it hired Reed Meyer to create a fraud detection algorithm to sniff out suspect reviews. Mr. Meyer would not disclose how the program worked because he did not want to tip off hotels on how to circumvent it. Nor will he say how many reviews have been weeded out by the application.
Christine Petersen, TripAdvisor's senior vice president for marketing, said, "Hotels periodically try to get around the system." In one memorable case, an Italian hotelier offered the site a bottle of Limoncello di Capri liqueur if the site would remove a poor review of his property. The site declined.
"If a hotel is caught trying to influence the process, they're put on a watch list," she said. "That influences their ranking, and is a huge black mark against them."
Hotel executives agree that the stakes are high in the ratings game, especially when it comes to business travelers, but they maintain that their efforts to influence the process are legitimate. If anything, they say, the review sites have gone too far to prevent positive guest comments from being published.
Take the case of Amelia Island Plantation, a conference hotel on Amelia Island, Fla. It recently sent an e-mail message to its customers urging them to submit positive reviews to several hotel ratings sites, including TripAdvisor.
"Please visit these Web sites from your home computer and tell them about your wonderful experience at Amelia Island Plantation," it said. "If you do not have an experience that you can relate, send these sites to your friends or family that have had nice experiences."
Richard Goldman, the vice president for marketing at the resort, said he sent the note to guests to counter negative reviews about the property that were a result of confusion over Amelia Island Plantation Inn and nearby condominiums. With 67 percent of the resort's guests going to the island on business trips, he said, "every review matters." He added, "I don't think there's anything wrong with what we did."
TripAdvisor disagreed. When it found out about the e-mail message, it deleted all of the hotel's reviews posted after the note was sent and imposed a moratorium on new ratings. (As a result of deleting the later reviews, the hotel's rankings fell to 31/2 stars out of a possible 5.)
But the inn's actions seem benign compared with some of the other tactics that are said to be used to populate Web sites with positive reviews. A hotel in Key West, Fla., recently offered its guests a 10 percent discount for publishing a rave review on TripAdvisor. We8there.com routinely intercepts reviews submitted by hotel employees and their spouses.
Web site publishers say they have heard about secretive "reputation management" departments at hotels that submit fake reviews from alias e-mail accounts, with typographical errors added for authenticity.
The American Hotel and Lodging Association does not have a formal policy on how a property should manage its online reputation. "It's up to each hotel or hotel company," said a spokeswoman, Kathryn Potter.
Del Ross, the vice president for global e-commerce at the InterContinental Hotels Group, which owns the Crowne Plaza and Holiday Inn brands, says his company closely tracks what is being said about its properties. But the only time it steps into the process is to investigate a documented negative experience that might be repeated. "Every negative remark," he added, "is an opportunity to improve."
The Hilton Hotels Corporation, which owns the Doubletree, Embassy Suites and Hampton Inn brands, also follows the ratings sites. But trying to influence the system by prompting employees or guests to write a positive review "would not be ethical," said Bala Subramanian, Hilton's senior vice president for distribution and brand integration.
"What's more, it's a waste of time," he said. "If we have a problem with one of our hotels, we want to address the problem, not rig the system."
For many business travelers, the efforts to sway the online reviews may be meaningless. David Deehl, a lawyer based in Coral Gables, Fla., said he was not only mindful that hotels would try to promote themselves on the review sites, but also wondered how much he had in common with hotel guests who took the time to post their observations online.
"If I need the name of a good hotel, I'd rather call a friend," he said. "There is no substitute for a word-of-mouth recommendation."