Tourists: TripAdvisor blocked warnings
Mexico resort victims fault its policy on posts
In late July, an Indianapolis woman posed a question on TripAdvisor: Should she and her husband travel to Riviera Maya for a Mexican vacation?
They had read about problems with alcohol at the resorts — vacationers who blacked out and were assaulted, robbed, raped, even died.
Her husband wanted to cancel; she did not.
After 10 days, there were 55 replies. Twenty-four comments encour- aged the couple not to worry. “Just got back on Saturday and never felt safer,” wrote BeachDog77 from New York.
Four included irrelevant comments, such as “The pools are 4.3 feet deep.”
What about the other 27 posts? Did anyone share warnings?
The public had no way to know. The posts had all been replaced with mes- sages from TripAdvisor that said they were “determined to be inappropriate by the TripAdvisor community,” “offtopic” or contained subject matter that was not “family friendly.” The Milwau
kee Journal Sentinel, part of the USA TODAY Network, asked TripAdvisor to see the posts that were removed. The company refused.
Since July, when the Journal Sentinel began investigating the mysterious death of a Wisconsin college student in Mexico — and found widespread problems with tainted alcohol, derelict law enforcement and price gouging from hospitals — more than a dozen travelers from across the country have said TripAdvisor muzzled
“This is a major problem with online reviews, they’re heavily skewed. We don’t ask the hard questions and don’t realize the information is imperfect and biased.”
Bart De Langhe, associate professor of marketing at ESADE business school in Barcelona
their first-hand stories of blackouts, rapes and other ways they were injured while vacationing in Mexico.
“To me it’s like censoring,” said Wendy Avery-Swanson of Phoenix, whose recent review of a Mexican resort — describing how she blacked out from a small amount of alcohol served at the swim-up bar — was removed from the website.
“It wasn’t hearsay,” as TripAdvisor claimed, said Avery-Swanson, 52. “It actually happened to me.”
Massachusetts-based TripAdvisor touts its 535 million user reviews of hotels, restaurants and attractions around the globe. Company officials say it uses software to detect fake reviews and has hundreds of employees dedicated to policing posts and ensuring “content integrity.”
A Journal Sentinel investigation into the workings of the $1.5 billion company has found that it is what TripAdvisor does not publish that poses problems for travelers.
The company’s practices obscure the public’s ability to fully evaluate the information on its site. Secret algorithms determine which hotels and resorts appear when consumers search. Some hotels pay TripAdvisor when travelers click on their links; some pay commissions when tourists book or travel.
There’s no way to know how many negative reviews are withheld by TripAdvisor; how many terrifying experiences never get told; or for site users to know that much of what they see has been selected to encourage them to spend.
“This is a major problem with online reviews, they’re heavily skewed,” said Bart De Langhe, associate professor of marketing at ESADE business school in Barcelona, who specializes in consumer behavior and user reviews. “We don’t ask the hard questions and don’t realize the information is imperfect and biased.”
User ratings of all kinds carry an overblown amount of credibility, De Langhe said.
In the case of TripAdvisor — which built its reputation as a bulletin board for traveler advice — it may not be at all obvious to consumers that its business model depends on travelers booking trips.
In an August filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, executives stressed the importance that the company “convert these visitors into engaged users and bookers.”
“Advertisers will not continue to do business with us if their investment in such advertising does not generate sales leads, customers, bookings, or revenue and profit.”
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Seven years ago, TripAdvisor removed a post written by Kristie Love, 35, a mother of two from Dallas. Love told how she had been raped by a security guard at a highly rated Mexican resort owned by the global chain, Iberostar, based in Spain.
She wrote how, after an evening with friends, she had returned to her room to find the electronic key card no longer opened her door at the Iberostar Paraiso near Playa del Carmen. She headed to the lobby of the sprawling resort to get her card reactivated, stopping to ask a uniformed guard whether she was walking in the right direction.
A TripAdvisor moderator spotted her post and deemed it in violation of the company’s “family friendly” guidelines.
The following year, another young woman, 19 and on vacation with her family, reported to hotel officials in the same resort complex that a security guard had raped her in the bathroom.
And in 2015, still another woman, Jamie Valeri, 34, a mother of six from Wisconsin, was sexually assaulted at the same resort after she and her husband simultaneously blacked out in the middle of the day, barely into their third drink.
Those are just the rapes at one resort reported directly to the Journal Sentinel by travelers who read earlier stories.
Last week, TripAdvisor told the Journal Sentinel it is designing a new “badge” system to alert travelers to major media stories that expose concerns at hotels, restaurants or attractions.
And on Oct. 19, seven years to the day after Love was raped, TripAdvisor republished her original report.
“It’s the kind of information we absolutely want published,” Brian Hoyt, spokesman for TripAdvisor, said.
The forum post landed in its original chronological spot, more than 2,600 pages deep, behind thousands of more recent threads.
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A Journal Sentinel examination of TripAdvisor identified a host of issues that inhibit users from getting a complete picture of what they’re allowed to see.
Consider:
** Some non-employees — termed “trusted community members” — have the ability to remove forum posts. But TripAdvisor won’t disclose who they are or how they’re selected
** Those designated as “destination experts” — people the company uses to respond to safety concerns or suggest restaurants or activities — include local tour guides, resort managers, real estate brokers, property owners and others with a financial stake. Those financial ties are not disclosed.
** The placement hotel booking partners receive on the site is based in part on what they pay TripAdvisor each time a visitor clicks their link or makes a reservation, according to interviews and company reports to shareholders.
** TripAdvisor launched an “instant booking” feature in 2014 that allows travelers to initiate booking directly. The company has contracts with hotels and online travel agencies that earn TripAdvisor a 12% to 15% commission. ***
TripAdvisor said its results are tailored to individuals based on search history, prior purchases and assumptions it makes from the search, among other factors. The Journal Sentinel’s analyses, however, were based on searches from private browsers with no search histories.
A spot check of seven recent forum threads pertaining to alcohol safety problems found 17% of comments had been deleted. That compares to about 2% in a sample of nearly 1,000 more general threads.
TripAdvisor would not allow the Journal Sentinel to see any posts or reviews that had been removed.
Hoyt said he personally reviewed some of the rejected answers to the question from the Indianapolis woman asking whether she and her husband should take their trip. He acknowledged that “about a dozen” of the 27 deleted posts should not have been removed