RealHolidayReports has been purchased by UK holiday review site Sunshine.co.uk. The online travel agency says the acquisition was for better informing clients about holidays.
Holiday and Hotel Reviews – How Current, How Good?
Also according to the news, the website is to be an ad-free tool for Sunshine clients to make use of. Chris Clarkson, Managing Director of sunshine.co.uk, offered this:
“We’re always looking for investment opportunities and realholidayreports.com looked like it had real potential.”
Formerly part of the Hays Travel Independence Group, Sunshine offers low cost holidays and services worldwide. Further details of the deal are not available, but TravelMole has more info.
On the value proposition for Sunshine, this long time tech analyst cannot leave off with a tiny critique. Discovery on the RealHolidayReports site is fairly pitiful. No visible “about” or validation of reviewers is up front, and many of the reviews are so old as to be virtually worthless. Add to this some of the most famous hotels in the world missing from the database, and one has to wonder if Sunshine just wanted the domain?
Daios Cove Luxury Resort & Villas
By way of an example the “Reviews for Havania Apartments, Aghios Nikolaos, Crete” is the highest rated accommodation there, according to the site, and based on one review from 2006. The image above is the most recent I could find from Havania. Compare this with TripAdvisor’s second choice of Daios Cove Luxury Resort & Villas and 694 reviews (image below) and you see the rub. To be fair to Havania, 19 TripAdvisor users rated the hotel very high too. Interestingly, Daios Cove and hundreds of other Crete hotels are not even reviewed?
Courtesy Havania Apartments