美国国家公共电台 NPR Falling Stars: Negative Yelp Reviews Target Trump Restaurants, Hotels

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NPR has done a lot of reporting on links between Donald Trump 1's presidency 2 and his business interests, how serving in the White House may be enriching Trump and his family. But in one way at least, Trump's political career might be working against his company. As NPR's Jim Zarroli reports, online reviews of Trump properties have gotten a lot more negative.

JIM ZARROLI, BYLINE 3: Last summer, Donald Trump rocked the political world by winning the Republican nomination 4 for president. And something else happened around the same time. People started leaving a lot of really bad reviews for Trump properties online, like this one for the Trump International Hotel and Tower in New York.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Not a pleasant experience. I felt like I was going to be groped the whole time I was in the hotel. Maybe it was just the vibe from the name of the hotel, won't be visiting again.

ZARROLI: Or this one from Mar-a-Lago.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Very loud and distracting dinner atmosphere. I just wanted a quiet, peaceful meal. But White House staff and diplomats 5 at the next table kept shouting out classified information.

ZARROLI: We had NPR staffers read those online reviews. Of course, there are also a lot of positive reviews from Trump fans. But the marketing 6 software company Signpost says the bad ones now outnumber the good ones. Yelp 7 has even posted a banner on the page for Trump properties, warning that the reviews may be suspect. Yelp has software that weeds out reviews for political content.

But it's not just that the reviews have gotten snarkier, Signpost CEO and founder 8 Stuart Wall says there are a lot more one-star ratings than there used to be for Trump properties.

STUART WALL: The rating itself has fallen a bit faster since he was inaugurated. In February in particular, we saw a spike 9 in one-star reviews. There were about 160 one-star reviews written for Trump properties in the month of February alone.

ZARROLI: And that's a problem because when consumers choose hotels and restaurants, they often don't read the reviews. They just go by the number of stars a place gets. Sometimes they just start by looking at the highest-ranked properties and don't even scroll 10 further down the list. Michael Luca, professor at Harvard Business School, says online ratings have become very important. Luca did a study on how changes in star ratings on Yelp affected 11 the revenue of restaurants in Seattle.

MICHAEL LUCA: For independent restaurants, Yelp ratings matter a lot. So a one star increase maps to about 5 to 9 percent increase in sales.

ZARROLI: And by that measure, a drop of one star in the rankings for Trump's U.S. properties could amount to a loss of $33 million on the company's annual revenues, which Signpost estimates at about $557 million. The Trump Organization did not respond to requests for comment.

Trump, of course, is an unusual case. Michael Luca cautions that Trump already has a well-established national brand name, so online reviews may not matter quite as much as they do for smaller properties. He also points out that The Trump Organization is building lots of new hotels. And it just raised fees at Mar-a-Lago.

LUCA: It seems that at least Trump thinks that the benefits of the brand building of being president that they are now kind of trying to translate into business gains seems to be a bigger factor than any negative effect that might be coming through an influx 12 of negative reviews.

ZARROLI: For Donald Trump the businessman, the lousy reviews on Yelp and TripAdvisor suggest there's a downside to the presidency. But so far, at least, there's a big upside as well. Jim Zarroli, NPR News, New York.

(SOUNDBITE OF THE SHACKS SONG, "NO SURPRISE - INSTRUMENTAL")