Dear Travel Designer,

She calls you from the hotel lobby.

She's not angry yet. That comes later. Right now, she's confused. Disoriented. This wasn't supposed to happen. Not on THIS trip. Not at THIS hotel. Not after what she paid.

"Ben," she says, "there are cockroaches in the room."

Not one. Multiple sightings. Night one, one in the bathroom. Night two, something crawling near the minibar. She asked to switch rooms. The front desk was polite but unhelpful. The new room had a broken air conditioning unit that's been broken, she's told by the housekeeper, for "a few weeks." It's 31 degrees outside.

This is a €13,000 trip. It's her parents' 50th wedding anniversary. Her father is 78. There will not be a 55th.

She booked through you because you're the expert. Because you told her this was one of the best resorts on the island. Because she trusted you with the most important trip of her parents' lives.

"Why did you recommend this place?"

What do you say?

What you don't know yet

Here's what you're NOT going to say, because you don't know it yet:

That resort has had cockroach reports in its guest reviews for three years. On Google. On Booking.com. Documented, dated, detailed. Guests describing insects in the rooms, cockroach legs on the floor, pest issues on the upper floors.

You're not going to say that because you didn't go through 5,000 reviews before recommending the property. Of course you didn't. Nobody does.

But here's what makes it worse: even if you HAD scrolled through the reviews, you might not have found them. Because the hotel has been buying five-star reviews in bulk to bury the negative ones. Our analysis identified a single month where 172 reviews appeared, all averaging 4.7 stars, in a pattern that is statistically consistent with purchased reviews. The real guest experience is hiding beneath a layer of fabricated praise that was purchased specifically so that people like you — and people like your client — wouldn't see the truth.

The hotel's Google rating is 4.6 stars.

Your client is standing in the lobby with cockroaches in her parents' anniversary suite.

And the information that could have prevented this was there the entire time. In the data. Invisible to anyone who wasn't looking for it with the right tools.

Who I am

My name is Ben Racz. I run Hotel Shortlist.

We do one thing: forensic reputation intelligence for premium hotel properties. We don't review hotels. We don't sell hotel rooms (well, we do — but that's not why I'm writing). We analyze every review, on every major platform, and extract the signals that separate what a hotel says it is from what it actually is.

We look at things no human could see by scrolling:

Review authenticity. Is the rating real? Or has it been manufactured with purchased reviews? We detect the statistical fingerprints of bulk review purchases — abnormal velocity spikes, rating distribution anomalies, platform-to-platform surpluses that indicate review buying on one channel.

Buried operational issues. Pest reports. Maintenance failures. Service deterioration. Things guests write about in their reviews that get drowned out by volume or suppressed by the hotel.

Quiet spells. Months where a busy property suddenly goes quiet, outside the pandemic and outside any renovation. Often a gap like this is innocent. When it is not, we can usually recover what went missing, and in the rare case it ever matters, it holds up as evidence.

I've enclosed a sample of our Reputation Intelligence Brief. Flip to the review history chart. See the spike in November 2019? See the pest citations pulled from across three years of reviews?

That property has a 9.0 on Booking and a 4.6 on Google. It's a major chain. Five stars. Your consortium probably recommends it.

What's at stake for you

Let me be direct about what's at stake for you personally.

You are not TUI. You do not have 4,200 families to absorb the loss of one. You are a designer, or a small studio of three or four, and your business runs on a very short list of clients who trust you completely and pay you accordingly.

How many clients do you need to lose before it hurts?

One?

If Mrs. Client loses faith in you because of one bad recommendation — one cockroach, one broken AC, one ruined anniversary — she doesn't just stop booking with you. She tells her friends. She tells her book club. She tells the other couples they travel with. She tells them "I used to use an advisor but honestly, I just book on Amex Fine Hotels now."

You don't lose one client. You lose the network.

And the worst part? You'll never know why the referrals stopped. She won't call you to complain after the trip. She'll just quietly stop calling.

Unless you call her first. From the lobby. Because you already know about the cockroaches.

What I'm proposing

Here's what I'm proposing.

Give me the names of your 10 most-recommended properties. The ones you book most often. The ones your reputation rides on. The ones where, if a client found cockroaches, you'd feel physically ill.

I'll run a full Reputation Intelligence Brief on each one. Takes us 10 business days. You'll know — for every single property on your shortlist — whether the rating is real, whether there are buried pest or maintenance issues, whether the hotel is hiding complaints.

You don't send everyone to the same ten hotels, and the list doesn't either. Next month, swap any of them for any other hotel.

Every month you get a digest on each property, across every platform: the whole review history, and what changed in the last month. The members’ version covers Google alone, once a year. This one is every platform, every month. So when a hotel you recommend starts to turn, you hear it from us, in writing, before your client does.

You pay per property, per month, and the more you watch, the less each one costs: 3 properties, €65 each. 10, €54. 25, €47. 50, €42. Any number in between, on the same smooth scale. Considerably less than her minibar.

Five names, free

So find out first, starting this week. Give me your five most-recommended hotels, and I'll run the full due diligence on all five, free, inside a week. No pitch.

If all five are clean, you have your judgment confirmed in writing, and you are allowed to be smug about it.

If they're not — you found out from me, in a private report, instead of from your client, in a phone call from a hotel lobby, while a 78-year-old man and his wife sit in the bar wondering why their anniversary trip has cockroaches.

One more thing.

Our consumer-facing platform is live. It's called Hotel Shortlist. When we flag a property with pest issues or review manipulation, that flag is visible to anyone who visits our site.

Your clients are increasingly the kind of people who research obsessively before they book. If one of them Googles a hotel you've recommended and finds our page showing a "Not recommended" label with pest citations and review fraud analysis — they're going to forward it to you and ask why you recommended it.

Better you find it first.

Ben Racz, Founder, Hotel Shortlist — |

P.S. I know what you're thinking. "My properties are fine. I've been recommending them for years. I'd know if there were cockroaches." Maybe. But the advisor in the story at the top of this letter thought the same thing. The difference between her and you is that you're reading this letter and she didn't get one. Five property names. That's all I'm asking. .