Businesses ‘pay for fake reviews on TripAdvisor’
HOTELS and restaurants are trying to cheat their way to the top of TripAdvisor rankings and smear rivals with fake reviews, according to an investigation.
The travel site now has so much influence that many businesses depend on coming in the top ten for their city or town. And some allegedly resort to underhand tactics to manipulate the listings, paying third parties for fake write-ups.
It has been claimed that as many as one in three reviews may be bogus – a statistic fiercely rejected by TripAdvisor, which receives 50million UK visits each month.
Investigators from The Times set up a bogus fake reviews website that attracted inquiries for both positive and negative entries, it said.
One was from an unnamed chain of cafes which ordered 20 five-star reviews for an outlet that had suffered bad reviews, and a boutique hotel in Wales asked for five reviews focusing on the venue’s ‘relaxed atmosphere’ and ‘comfy sofas’, it said.
When contacted, the businesses claimed they had fallen victim to malicious fake reviews and accused TripAdvisor of being slow to respond to complaints.
Another business owner wanted to buy 50 fake negative reviews to damage a rival’s reputation amid suspicions of a blackmail attempt.
Investigators for the paper also set up a TripAdvisor account and posted ten bogus reviews on the site without being detected, it reported.
One consumer website says as many as one in three TripAdvisor reviews are fake. Saoud Khalifah, founder of Fakespot, said: ‘I would advise TripAdvisor users to approach every review with scepticism.’
And a survey by the British Hospitality Association found more than half of hoteliers believe TripAdvisor is ‘not very helpful’ at dealing with malicious content.
A TripAdvisor spokesman branded the claim a third of its reviews are fake as ‘inaccurate and misleading’ and slammed Fakespot’s analysis as ‘extremely unreliable and fundamentally flawed’.
It said no other review platform did as much to prevent fake reviews.