TripAdvisor Reviews Called Into Question

TripAdvisor, the hotel review site, has come under fire over the reliability of its user-generated reviews.

Critics have pointed out that the TripAdvisor is unable to police its own content and ensure that reviews are not written by hoteliers themselves. The site, which claims to have around 11 million registered members, is an increasingly important tool for hoteliers, who in many cases can receive 90% of their bookings either directly or indirectly from the site.

There are approximately 25 million reviews on TripAdvisor, spanning almost half a million tourist attractions across the world.

One hotelier featured in the Sunday Times, claims to have been the latest victim of foul play on TripAdvisor. The owner of the Los Castaños hotel in Southern Spain claims that up until a fortnight ago, her property was ranked number one on TripAdvisor’s listings for the local area. However, TripAdvisor removed a number of recent positive reviews when a rival hotelier complained, resulting in a sharp decrease of not only the hotel’s TripAdvisor ratings, but also in the number of bookings. Di Beach, The hotel owner, told the Sunday Times she had doubts of the legitimacy of a negative review which replaced the positive ones removed,

“What worries me is that this reviewer claims to have stayed here in May 2008, my register says he didn’t. There’s definitely something wrong at TripAdvisor.”

Although TripAdvisor claims that the majority of “fraudulent reviews” are discovered by a “team of quality- assurance specialists”, other hoteliers claim to have even been approached by professional companies offering to write reviews for them. Offending hotels are flagged up on the website with red warning messages, yet further research from The Sunday Times discovered that there were less than 30 hotels marked with a red flag throughout the entire world, which suggests that either only an insignificant percentage of reviews are fake, or alternatively that many more are posted without being noticed by quality assurance specialists.