This is Business Daily and I'm Elizabeth Hotson.

Have you ever felt like online reviews aren't always as they seem?

In today's show, we're exploring the good, the bad and the ugly when it comes to reviews.

There's the so-called influencers demanding a free meal in return for reviews.

They're expecting me or whoever they thought was managing the social media

to understand that as meaning we want to come for a free meal,

which I thought was appalling.

And we'll also ask why handling negative reviews well can be good for business

and what the online review sites are doing to weed out the fraudsters.

Typically fake reviewers aren't trying to get one review up of a property.

They're trying to get multiple reviews up.

There's those connection between reviews that help us identify when something suspicious is going on.

This is Business Daily on the BBC.

In many parts of the world, we can finally travel and eat out again, spend a bit of money.

But the whole experience feels kind of unfamiliar.

So last month, when I went away for the first time in 18 months,

I trawled through the review sites to get a bit of a helping hand.

And that's when things got a bit odd.

I chose a newly opened hotel, which had some very good reviews and some lovely pictures.

There were some negative comments, but ever the optimist, I decided to go for it.

But it turned out that the less enthusiastic summaries were actually far more accurate.

And it got me thinking why there was such a discrepancy.

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