Dear Tour Operator,

It's 11:47 PM on a Saturday in August.

You're at home. Maybe you've had a glass of wine. The week was long. Tomorrow's Sunday and you've earned it.

Your phone buzzes. It's a Google Alert. Your company name.

You open it and your stomach drops.

A woman — 34, mother of two, first holiday in three years — has posted a video to TikTok from her hotel room at a resort in Tenerife. YOUR resort. The one you contracted, you negotiated the rate on, you put in the brochure, you sold to 4,200 families this summer.

In the video, she pulls back the duvet and there's a cockroach on the sheet. Not a small one. Her daughter is crying in the background. The caption reads: "€3,700 for THIS. Thanks @[YourBrand]. Never again."

It's got 40,000 views. By morning it'll have 400,000.

The cockroaches were in the reviews

And here's the part that's going to keep you up for the rest of the night:

The cockroaches were in the reviews. They've been in the reviews for three years. Guest after guest, reporting the same thing. On Google. On Booking.com. On TripAdvisor. Dated, timestamped, detailed.

"We had bugs in the room, including centipede-type insects, and on the last night a large cockroach — on the 10th floor."

"I did request 3rd or 4th floor room but don't think it is a privilege room... does require a refurbishment, door is marked and broke at the bottom allowing two cockroach's to enter."

"Can't complain too much for the price, but on night three, we had a cockroach leg across the floor."

These aren't from obscure corners of the internet. These are Google and Booking.com reviews. Public. Searchable. Sitting there for anyone to see.

Nobody on your team went through them. Nobody on your team was equipped to — because the hotel has 4,809 Google reviews and the cockroach mentions are buried under thousands of purchased 5-star ratings that were bought specifically to hide them.

You didn't know.

But you should have.

"Were you aware?"

And when the journalist from The Sun calls your press office on Monday morning and asks "Were you aware of the documented pest issues at this property prior to including it in your programme?" — what's your answer?

"No, we weren't aware"? That's an admission that your quality control failed.

"Yes, we were aware"? That's an admission that you sold the holidays anyway.

There isn't a good answer. There's only the answer you give before this happens versus the answer you give after.

Who I am

My name is Ben Racz. I'm the founder of Hotel Shortlist.

Before you throw this letter away, let me tell you what I am NOT.

I am not a hotel consultant who's going to charge you €230,000 to tell you things you already know. I am not a PR firm who's going to help you draft a crisis statement after the TikTok video goes viral. I am not a tech vendor who wants to sell you a "platform" that requires a six-month integration.

Here's what I am:

I'm the person who already found the cockroaches.

Not by visiting the hotel. Not by hiring inspectors. By doing something absurdly simple that nobody in your industry is doing systematically: investigating every single review, on every single platform, for every single property — and using forensic analytics to find the things that humans miss and hotels actively hide.

What we found at one hotel in Tenerife

We analyzed 36 properties in Tenerife alone. Here's what we found at just one of them — a property that is, right now, available for booking through at least two major UK tour operators:

Pest reports: Guest reviews documenting cockroach sightings across multiple years. Most recent: less than 90 days ago.

Review fraud: 172 reviews appeared in a single month, averaging 4.7 stars, far above the baseline. That's not a coincidence. That's a bulk purchase. Someone at this hotel — or their marketing agency — bought those reviews to push the cockroach complaints below the fold.

Quiet spells: we chart every month of reviews, so we also see when a busy hotel suddenly goes quiet. At another hotel we watch, reviews ran at over a hundred a month, then nearly stopped in late 2022, and the rating came back almost a point lower. Not the pandemic: that dip is two years earlier. 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. Mostly, it just means you know.

Ongoing maintenance failures: Air conditioning complaints appearing consistently across 18+ months of reviews. This isn't a one-off. The physical plant is deteriorating and the operator is not investing.

The hotel's Google rating? 4.6 stars. Looks lovely, doesn't it.

Now. How many properties in your summer programme have you vetted to this level?

I already know the answer. Zero. Because your quality process is: site visit once a year. Maybe twice. Check the rooms, check the pool, check the buffet, take some photos for the contracting file, fly home.

Between those visits? You're blind. You're relying on the hotel to tell you the truth about its own problems. And the hotel — as we've just established — is spending money to HIDE its problems, not fix them.

What I want to do for you

Here's what I want to do for you.

Pick a destination. Your biggest one. The one with the most bookings, the most exposure, the most risk if something goes sideways.

Give me the list of contracted properties in that destination. Twenty hotels, forty, sixty — doesn't matter.

Within three weeks, I'll deliver a Reputation Intelligence Brief on every single one. Complete review history. Pest and hygiene extraction. Review authenticity scoring. Operational trend analysis. Risk rating.

The ones that are clean, I'll confirm. The ones that aren't — you'll know exactly what's wrong, how long it's been wrong, and how hard the hotel has been working to hide it.

After that, every month, a digest on every property across every platform: red, amber or green, the whole review history, and what changed in the last month. The members’ version covers Google alone, once a year. Yours is every platform, every month. So when something turns at a hotel you sell, you hear it from us, in writing, that month. Not on TikTok.

What it costs

You pay per property, per month, and the more you watch, the less each one costs: 20 properties, €133 each. 40, €102. 100, €72. 200, €55. Any number in between, on the same smooth scale.

I'll say this plainly: about a hundred euros a property a month is less than you'll spend on crisis PR in the first 48 hours after the TikTok video. It's less than the refund bill for a single coach-load of guests at a cockroach hotel. It's less than the cost of one seat at the meeting where your board asks your quality director what happened and why.

Five hotels, free

Here's what I'm asking you to do right now.

Don't buy anything. Don't sign anything. Don't commit to anything.

Just give me five hotel names. Five properties from your current programme. Any destination. Email them to me at or text them to . You can reply to this letter on the back of an envelope if you want.

I'll run the due diligence on those five. Complimentary. No strings. Takes us less than a week. You'll get a report on each one.

If all five come back clean — genuinely, no issues, no flags, nothing concerning — I'll tell you so. You'll have peace of mind and it cost you nothing. We'll shake hands and I'll leave you alone.

But I don't think all five will come back clean.

And when they don't, you'll have a choice. You can deal with the problem before your guests find it. Or you can wait for the TikTok video.

One of those options costs about a hundred euros a property a month.

The other costs everything else.

Ben Racz, Founder, Hotel Shortlist — |

P.S. I debated whether to include this, but you need to see it. The page I've paper-clipped to the back of this letter is a screenshot from a real review, on a real platform, for a real hotel in a destination you sell. Look at it. Then check whether that hotel is in your brochure. If you don't want to do that yourself, send me the name of the hotel and I'll tell you everything we know about it, inside a week.

P.P.S. Peak summer is a few weeks away. If a guest finds cockroaches at one of your contracted properties this July and you're sitting on this letter from May — how does that conversation go with your board?