Last week Lao Zhang came back from Dali, slamming the table
Last week Lao Zhang came back from Dali ranting: "4.8-rated B&B, leaky AC, WiFi that barely exists." I checked Booking — yep, 4.8. We later figured it out: booking platforms "filter" bad reviews, or let merchants delete them in exchange for compensation. Result: every hotel is always 4.7.
A guy named Pieter Levels got fed up and built his own site
Pieter Levels is a well-known "one-person company" player abroad — he previously built Nomad List (a digital nomad community). He noticed Airbnb, Google Maps, and Booking all tend to suppress bad reviews, so he wrote Hotelist.com, which aggregates reviews across platforms as-is, keeping all the bad ones. I tried it on a Hangzhou hostel: 5.9 rating. Truth, haha.
The biggest takeaway for me isn't "book a hotel" — it's "where platforms suppress truth, someone will pay to tell it." This kind of "truth business" has plenty of opportunities in China too: Taobao store lists that don't delete bad reviews, WeChat public account rankings that don't run sponsored posts, restaurant maps that don't fake orders.
If you want to build one too — money and time breakdown
Money: Domain + server. Pieter said the whole project cost under $50 (~350 RMB), using cheap options — not the hundreds of thousands people imagine.
Time: About 2-3 weeks to build, assuming you know some tech or can find a tech co-founder. I made this mistake myself — thought I could finish in a week, but just unifying review formats across platforms took me two weeks.
Tech barrier: Scrape public reviews from the web, build a simple site, have a database. One-line summary: "You don't need to code, but you need someone who can code for you, or know how to use AI coding tools like Cursor."
First step: Go to Hotelist.com, look up two hotels you've actually stayed at, and see if the bad reviews match what you wanted to complain about at the time. If yes — you've validated a similar need.
Quick advice for three types of friends
If you're just starting out (0 customers): I wouldn't rush to build a site. Grab an A4 paper and write down "which Chinese domain has big platforms suppressing the truth?" — B&Bs, restaurants, courses, medical aesthetics, driving schools — you can list at least 10. Pick the one you know best, start there.
If you have 1-2 customers: I'd go straight to Xiaohongshu / WeChat topic lists, like "Hangzhou Real B&B Red/Black List," updating 3 per week, collecting ratings via online spreadsheets. Validating demand is ten thousand times more important than writing code. I made this mistake before — coded first, found customers later, ended up with something nobody used.
If you're scaling: I'd study Pieter's approach — one person, millions of users, ultra-low cost plus minimal features. Cut 80% of your product's features and see if it still runs. Simple is the moat.
One last thing: this site isn't for everyone. If you're just booking a hotel, open Booking. But if you're building a "truth business" or hunting niches ignored by big platforms, this story is worth bookmarking.