How Online Travel Agents are producing super tour guides
When it comes to reading Tripadvisor reviews read them all
Me Jamie, your host, I am English and I have lived in Hong Kong for 53 years - I know the place.
I have personally completed 2,300+ Private Tours and Experiences (over 6,000+ guests) since April 2011 and I am considered one of the finest Private Tour Guides in Asia.
A blog post with a difference
Please do visit Hong Kong in 2025 | Travel, Tourism, Tours, Tips, Daily Life and my personal thoughts on Hong Kong.
Hong Kong | Pearl of the Orient
Customised Private Tours & Experiences in Amazing Hong Kong
Pearl of the Orient
Private Tours Cultural Tours Walking Tours Sightseeing Tours City Tours Night Tours Transit Tours Shore Excursions
Carefully Crafted Personalised and Customised Itineraries by Jamie | Hong Kong’s Most Experienced Private Tour Guide For :
Solo Travellers Friends Families Seniors Couples Business People
J3 Group Hong Kong | J3 Consultants Hong Kong | J3 Private Tours Hong Kong
Creating Memories That Will Last A Lifetime
Book Now
How Online Travel Agents are producing super tour guides
When it comes to reading Tripadvisor reviews read them all
The Over Hyping of Tour Guides on OTA’s
click on the image to enlarge
I have been a Private Tour Guide since 2010, I was basically the first to offer Private Tours in Hong Kong and in the past 15 years I have watched as Online Travel Agents such as Viator, Tripadvisor, Get Your Guide, Klook and others have slowly but surely come to dominate the market for tours in Hong Kong and it is becoming harder and harder for small companies to get business.
This post is NOT sour grapes on my part, I have been in business for a long time and I understand competition, I understand that markets change, bad things happen (Covid), you adapt, that is the nature of business.
If you read some of my many blog posts you will see that I have no problem at all promoting my friends businesses, they are my friendly competitors, we are a small group of 12 companies whose aim it to provide the very best tours in Hong Kong, we are not a cartel, we do not engage in price fixing but we do have standards and we talk on Whatsapp extensively every day and out informal group has been around since 2014 and we are all great friends.
We all believe that quality is key and we all believe that the guides that do the tours have to be the best in the business, I am a team of one and will never hire other guides, but many of my friends have a different business model and have multiple guides and they train the heck out of them and yes, to myself and my friends getting a negative Tripadvisor review is like a kick in the teeth and we double down to ensure that if there was an issue then it will rectified… as I said we take our quality very seriously.
So what is the big deal with OTA’s or Online Travel Agents then,
I have written multiple blog posts about them, basically if you own and operate a small tour company then these days NOT listing with an OTA can cause serious harm to your business as it just becomes harder and harder to attract potential clients to visit your website., OTA’s dominate the first page on Google for every variation on queries for tours.
I dislike the OTA Platforms, small companies simply cannot compete with them and I am also realistic enough to know that I could probably do a private tour of Hong Kong every single day of the year if I was listed on Viator or Tripadvisor or all the OTA’s.
That is the only positive aspect.
What are the downsides of listing on an OTA? well, take your pick
you have to pay a large commission and I mean large on every tour you list
you can even rise to the top of rankings if you pay more commission, quality of the tour no longer matters
all your companies individuality is completely lost as you have to follow their listing template
you could have the worlds worst website and it will not affect your listing on the OTA
basically the listing template is the same for everyone and I think the template is overly complicated and in many respects just makes it harder to get a feel for the tour on offer and the company behind the tour and you waste an awful lot of time negotiating the template
there is no way that I can see that you can choose a guide, no photo, no bio, no information at all, so it is a crap shoot, you are assigned a guide from a pool and trust me, not all guides are created equal
offering a detailed itinerary with a time schedule for each stop is nonsense and I simply cannot understand why they do it. on my private tours, time is not a factor, we do what we do in the best and most efficient manner possible, we do not do tours with a stopwatch
there is far too much information given on the tour listing, their is NO mystery to the tour, everything just looks and feels generic
a lot of OTA’s have a lowest price guarantee which to me is nonsense as a lot of companies jack up the price to cover the OTA commission, you can probably get a better price by contacting the tour company through their own website and you will be able to choose the guide!
A lot of OTA’s have a reserve now | pay later policy but you still have to pay in full before the tour, with me NO Deposit, you pay me when we meet! so you can reserve a year in advance with NO deposit needed or payment in advance
I find the tour listings to be quite irrational, many tours have multiple options depending on how many hours, how many people and what sites you will see and you basically have to review a new listing for each variation it is utterly confusing
and just to show you, the company how irrelevant you are they show competitors listings on your listing, so one way or another, the OTA gets the booking, they call them similar experiences!
I have come across quite a few examples of fake AI manipulated images on tour listings, this is a terrible thing to do
I could go on but you get the message.
So…… the small matter of reviews and fake reviews over hyping tour guides comes into play, if you book a tour on Tripadvisor and Viator you need to be aware that your will also see a Tripadvisor review, which feels like a conflict of interest and you wonder if the reviews are real or potentially fake.
click on the image to enlarge
There is one company in Hong Kong that drives me mad and I have written a few times about them, I do not like the way they do business and there is no reason for them to do business in the way that they do, they are smart people and have done very well for themselves but they also seem to do business on price and price only, which means they offer very low prices on the OTA’s and yes, they aggressively chase for 5 star reviews on Tripadvisor.
In the tour business operating based on low, low prices is a recipe for disaster as the quality of the tour and therefore your experience is absolutely dependent on the quality of the guide and a great tour guide costs money.
So a lot of tour companies offer a low price and do not really take into consideration the effect a poor guide has on the experience, they have low standards and simply do not care about quality.
I have been on a couple of tours with a company offering cheap group tours, a hybrid of being on a bus and walking and they specialise in large groups all the way up to 100 people in the group.
Taking onto the streets a group of even 20 people (which I have experienced twice with them) was a miserable experience, I had the same guide twice who basically spouted exactly the same facts and figures (and a lot of incorrect ones at that) and she has things that she does for a laugh which are just cringe worthy, I often expected her to break into a song from Evita, there is just something about her that does not feel right and she absolutely has a split personality.
Every time I see a Tripadvisor review for her that praises her to high heaven I get mad (and yes, that is irrational)
I know that a lot of my friends would hire her in an instant just based on the Tripadvisor reviews she gets (which is why 2 of us did the tours, to see what she was like in person) unfortunately she gets too many negative reviews which totally contradict all the positive reviews…. perhaps she would thrive working for a Private Tour Company, who knows but I doubt it.
click on the image to enlarge
click on the image to enlarge
click on the image to enlarge
I should point out that the tour company has a canned reply for every negative and positive review, they simply do NOT care about feedback, if they did they would address the concerns of their guests.
These 3 reviews are pretty much very accurate and as you can see quite a contrast to the review at the top of the page, the superlatives used made me feel queasy
I mean seriously “Oh my god, what an amazing woman” “we will never forget you”
She is absolutely NOT a super tour guide and I have never seen any guide review no matter a group tour guide or a private tour guide get such lavish praise, I have gotten quite a number of great reviews but nothing as overpowering as this… with reviews like this she could be naming her own price at quality tour companies.
I have done a couple of tours with 15 | 16 people and never again (and that is over 2,330+ tours) no matter how good you are, that many people on a tour poses issues, you cannot build a rapport with so many people, you cannot engage in long discussions with individuals, you have to use a microphone to make yourself heard and you feel like you are herding cattle and all you are concerned about is NOT losing anyone oh and did I mention that everything slows to crawl.
Quite a few recent reviews for this company have mentioned that there was over 40 people on the tour, I cannot imagine how anyone could have such an amazing experience that they think that the guide is the 2nd coming of the Messiah.
I know a lot of people go on these cheap tours as they lower their expectations because they are rational, they know large group tours whether paid or free are not anywhere near the quality of a Private Tour, that is a fact., they do not mind being part of a large group and they are used to the guide memorising a canned script, you get what you pay for,
So before you go ahead and book one of these low cost tours on the OTA’s read all the reviews, constant use of superlatives are a dead giveaway on low cost group tours with 20 - 100 people in the group, any quality guide would be working for a private tour company and earning a lot more.
I have done a lot of research over the years on the subject of fake reviews and you can pay companies to write them for you and these reviews in many cases feel plausible but most of the time, the reviews are very short, use lots of superlatives, quite often the name of the guide is not even mentioned and there is no real specific details about the tour itself.
One of the reviews above mentions the aggressive tactics used to get a 5 star Tripadvisor review and for me that brings into question the validity of all of the reviews they get, are travellers writing them because they had a great experience or do they feel obliged, just to get the guide off their backs and yes, it is also true that they are quite aggressive in asking for tips which to me is just not the done things.
Sermon over, please, please do your research before making a decision on booking a tour.
© Jamie Lloyd | J3 Consultants Hong Kong | J3 Private Tours Hong Kong |
| 2010 - 2025 All rights reserved. |
Click on any image to enlarge to full screen
Current images from my Instagram feed
