A question of trust

As TripAdvisor faces more criticism for fake reviews, it’s time to find a new way of verifying who is posting online opinions

Once again, TripAdvisor has been called out for publishing fake reviews on its site, this time by Which magazine. In its August 2019 issue, Which claimed that of 250,000 reviews posted of the top ten hotels in the ten most popular tourist destinations on the site, one in seven carried “blatant hallmarks of fake positive reviews”.

Business travellers will be aware that this is only one of many claims about bogus reviews that have been made against the company since its inception at the turn of the millennium. But its longevity is testament to its popularity.

I have written previously ( in our September 2018 issue) about the challenges of rating hotels and the move of many companies to abandon the star-rating classification for what they perceive to be a more honest system. Hilton, for instance, refers to its different brands with terms such as “upper upscale” and “mid-scale”. They may not mean much to us, but within the industry this is how they benchmark against their competitors.

Meanwhile, InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) has adopted a system that verifies whether guest reviews are genuine by ensuring that they actually stayed before the post is published. Most reviewers appear to be IHG Rewards Club members. The company posts a self-generated star rating depending on the quality of the reviews it has verified.

All of these moves indicate that the industry seems to agree with the Which findings that TripAdvisor reviews are flawed and need to be treated with caution. A quick run-through of the reported court cases brought against it for misrepresentation can be found in Wikipedia’s entry regarding the company’s activities. Prior to the latest exposé, the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) launched an investigation into the site when a complaint was made by investigations company Kwikchex that TripAdvisor’s claims to provide trustworthy and honest reviews from travellers were false.

The ASA found that TripAdvisor “should not claim or imply that all its reviews were from real travellers, or were honest, real or trusted”. As a result of the investigation, it was ordered to remove the slogan “reviews you can trust” from its UK website.

A FLAWED SYSTEM

TripAdvisor has 315 million reviewers who have posted more than 500 million reviews. Its growth has been explosive since it launched in 2000. It was originally intended to be an aggregator of existing reviews from guidebooks and other sources such as newspapers. For some years the company developed and expanded under the umbrella of Expedia but was spun off in 2012 and subsequently floated on the NASDAQ exchange.

Shares opened at US$27 each and reached a peak of US$110 in June 2014, but have since been on a slide to an November 2019 price in the region of US$32.

Profit is driven by advertising revenue and by affiliate revenue – when you click on a link to book a hotel, if you complete the booking then TripAdvisor receives an agency fee, normally of between 10 and 15 per cent.

Undoubtedly, business travellers need to be aware that TripAdvisor controls a large chunk of the online reviews market and that, despite its best endeavours, it still appears to operate a system that seems flawed.

A restaurant owner in the French resort of SainteMaxime complained to me that of five restaurants on the beach where he is located, he alone received a series of bad reviews. He was able to demonstrate to Tripadvisor that the reviewer had never set foot in his establishment and subsequently TripAdvisor deleted the posts. He found it all very tiresome and timeconsuming not only to do the cooking as chef patron but also to keep a daily check on his listing. He had his suspicions as to who the malevolent critic might be and he wasn’t putting local jealousy aside.

What can be done to provide travellers with an honest system of appraisal? The answer seems to lie in the verification process. The hotel and restaurant industries need to take much greater steps to confirm the identity of their consumers.

IHG appears to be taking the lead here and business travellers can take comfort in the integrity of its property validation.

As for the rest, let caution be the watchword when enthusiastic webgenerated endorsement smacks of selfaggrandisement.

Hotel and restaurant industries need to take greater steps to confirm the identity of their consumers