TripAdvisor Being Investigated for Fake Reviews

Daily Mail: More than 45 million consumers use TripAdvisor each month to help them choose hotels and restaurants for their holidays.

But now the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) has launched an investigation into the popular review website, following growing criticism of its apparent failure to monitor fake comments posted online. (ASA is the UK's independent regulator of advertising across all media)

The formal inquiry was opened after a complaint that 'abuse, flaws and distortion' on the TripAdvisor website had reached 'epidemic levels'.

As many as five million of the most current reviews on the website could be fake, according to Chris Emmins, co-founder of online reputation management company KwikChex.com. 

After spending eight months looking into TripAdvisor, Mr Emmins found that half of the 50 million reviews posted are more than a year old, making them out of date. And of the 25 million left, up to 20 per cent of them could be bogus, he believes.

His company complained to the ASA after receiving more than 2,000 requests from desperate businesses in the hospitality industry suffering from review fraud, mainly on TripAdvisor.

'It is the smaller businesses that suffer the most,' Mr Emmins told TravelMail. 'Most can't defend themselves against these negative, and often defamatory, reviews. Lawyers' fees mount up and it is incredibly difficult to sue TripAdvisor. These small hotels and restaurants don't get a lot of reviews, so if they have two or three bad comments, which can sometimes be part of a coordinated attack, it absolutely decimates their business. I have had two or three companies coming to me saying they have had to close as a result and another owner was on medication to cope with the stress.'

Travel experts have long complained that hotel owners can manipulate their ranking on the website by posting fake glowing reviews or offering incentives for guests to write good comments. Caroline Blake, consultant editor of the Good Hotel Guide, claimed on her blog that she had tested TripAdvisor by posting fake reviews, which appeared on the site immediately. She said: 'It is despicable that people who haven't even stayed at hotels can wax lyrical about them to improve bookings.'

Hotels are also reporting increasing incidents of competitors or rogue 'reviewers' posting negative comments to discredit their rivals online. Mr Emmins points out an example of a group who stayed at a hotel for a wedding. Due to disruptive behaviour the police were called. In an act of malice, the eight guests all went online to post negative reviews on the hotel in question, sending its ranking plummeting.

With so much business riding on website reviews, underhand agencies have also been set up to cash in on the market, offering to post hundreds of positive comments on websites like TripAdvisor in return for a fee, in some cases thousands of pounds.

The ASA investigation will focus on TripAdvisor's claim that it contains 'honest travel reviews and opinions from real travellers around the world.' KwikChex alleges that TripAdvisor does not authenticate reviews or verify users as a matter of course. It also claims that the website refuses to remove fraudulent reviews, even when it has been proven they claim false accusations.

Under the ASA's Committee of Advertising Practice - or CAP code - companies are not allowed to use 'unverifiable' testimonials on their promotional material. Yet TripAdvisor allegedly encourages businesses to use quotes from its website on their own sites or in their brochures, despite not knowing where they come from. KwikChex believes this apparent breach of the ASA code could force TripAdvisor to verify where it gets its positive comments from and, in turn, who is posting the unduly negative reviews.

The ASA has confirmed an investigation is underway, and told TravelMail: 'This follows a complaint by KwikChex Ltd who challenged whether claims by TripAdvisor on their website, that user reviews were genuine and could be trusted, were misleading and could be substantiated.'

TripAdvisor will be asked to respond to the allegations and provide evidence to support its own position. When contacted about the investigation by TravelMail, a spokesperson issued a statement saying: 'TripAdvisor does not comment on current or potential regulatory investigations or litigation.'

However, the company claims to take the authenticity of its reviews 'very seriously' and says it has 'numerous methods' in place to ensure the legitimacy of comments 'including automated site tools, a team of review integrity experts, and our large and passionate community of millions of travellers that help us identify suspicious content.'

Interesting and Disturbing Travel Statistics

MSNBC: Ever wonder how much hotel soap travelers use or how much bacon they eat?

Apparently, the folks at Travelmatch, a U.K.-based price comparison site, have. Their latest effort, cheekily titled “Pigs, Planes and Urine,” takes a look at some statistics you won’t find in your average DOT or hospitality report.

Among the findings — enticing, disgusting or otherwise:

2.38 billion: The number of slices of hotel bacon travelers eat per year. At 340 slices per porker, that’s equivalent to 7 million pigs per year, or one whole hog every five seconds.

984 million: The number of pounds of hotel soap travelers use in a year. According to the number-crunchers at Travelmatch, that’s enough for an 86-billion-gallon bath, something you’ll appreciate when you consider ...

17 percent: The percentage of Americans who admit to peeing in the pool. Extrapolating that statistic to the global travel market, that’s equivalent to 19 Olympic-sized swimming pools filled to the brim with stuff you don’t want to swallow.

77 million: The number of cubic yards of sandcastles vacation children make per year — enough granular grandeur to make 24 copies of the Great Pyramid at Giza or fill 57 Empire State Buildings. (Soap and a soak anyone?)

237 million: The number of empty seats on planes per year. Gather them all up and it works out to 522,026 empty 747s, a humongous fleet in which one could supposedly fit 13.8 billion snakes.

Skeptics, no doubt, will scoff at such statistics, especially the millions of travelers who haven’t seen an empty seat since long before Samuel L. Jackson shared a plane with some of those aforementioned reptiles.

But according to Travelmatch co-founder and CEO Alex Francis, there’s more to the numbers than mere entertainment. “When compiling the statistics behind this piece, we were shocked by the magnitude of some of the numbers we were encountering,” he said. “The travel industry is an incredibly important part of the modern economy and it accounts for a large portion of the global GDP.”

How large? Let’s go to the numbers again:

99 million: The number of jobs supported by the travel industry worldwide, which according to Travelmatch, equates to 1.4 people out of every 100 on the planet.

$5.99 trillion: The number of dollars the human race spends on travel each year, enough money to buy 1,331 aircraft carriers or an iPad and iPhone for every person on the planet.

We’ll pass on the aircraft carriers but would go for the iPad/iPhone deal in a heartbeat. It would give us something to do when we’re staying out of the pool.