July 16, 2009 | E-mail article link | m-Travel.com
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TripAdvisor warns of hotels posting fake reviews: report
TripAdvisor has been quietly posting disclaimers to warn customers of hotels writing fake reviews to improve their popularity rankings or hurt competitors.
According to a report filed by The AP, the red disclaimers near the names of hotels show that TripAdvisor has a problem with fake reviews, travel bloggers and industry experts say.
The report highlighted that one blogger, Jeff Tucker, warned that without changes to restore credibility to the reviews the site is “going to come crumbling down behind them”.
But TripAdvisor said the disclaimers have been used since 2006 and involve a small fraction of the 400,000 hotels reviewed. The company said it has a successful system to root out inaccurate reviews.
“The 23 million reviews and opinions are authentic and they're unbiased and they're from real users,” spokesman Brooke Ferencsik said. “The vast majority of hoteliers, they understand the risk to their business and reputation if they attempt to post fraudulent information to TripAdvisor.”
TripAdvisor has been in news regarding the authenticity of its reviews, with hoteliers alleging that the market-leader has grown so large it is no longer able to police its content. There are claims within the industry that some hotels are using the site to attack rivals and boost their own ratings by posting fake reviews.
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Comments
Hello to all.... A question...Do you think I can take a lawyer against Tripadvisor? I mean...In Europe you cannot publish anything that offends someone or you must pay a lot of money but Tripadvisor published a very offensive comment .
In this comment the anonymous wrote: "xxxxx treated us terribly. He lied to us, stereotyped us, screamed at us, and worst of all - threatned us. It was insane and scary.
xxxxxx cares so much about his reputation, it's a little crazy. You can even find part of his website online where he literally finds every negative review ever written about him, and rebutts the negative points. I'm sure this one will be there soon, and I'm sure he will make up some crazy reasoning like he does with everyone else. "
This is of course totally false and should be considered VERY OFFENSIVE in Europe and for this reason not legal you cannot publish that. In Europe we call it: DEFAMATION....especially if it's made by an ANONYMOUS person...Do you think I should take a Lawyer?
Tripadvisor accepts this kind of ANONYMOUS comments made by anonymous persons that cannot prove they really stayed in the places (that has a name and an adress...so no anonymous) they reviewed.This is bad I think and not really legal
Tripadvisor publishes without investigating these type of comments and anytime a hotel or a Guesthouse want to reply...we have a lot of problems cause "we don't follow their Criterias"!!!..WHICH Criterias if they accept this type of offensive comments made by some Anonymous?...We also received some Fake comments by persons that were supposed to be with us in the period of our Seasonal Clousure!!!...We wrote that to Tripadvisor and Tripadvisor didn't want to move away the comment!!!...We needed 1 month to demostrate that we were closed!!!...But I mean...they consider more comments made by ANONYMOUS than reply made by HOTELS with NAME and ADRESS!..This is terrible!
What's your advise?
Thanks a lot to all
If you want I can also give you the link of this comment
Posted by: Giovanni | Nov 22, 2009 6:25:10 PM
This is the Reply made by tripadvisor !!!! What "Criteria do they have? They publish anonymous defamation and they don't accept our reply (NOT Anonymous!)
Dear Giloc,
Thank you for taking the time to write a management response on TripAdvisor.
Unfortunately, we cannot publish your response because it does not meet our posting criteria. We look forward to receiving your edited and resubmitted response through our management response form.
Please see the management response guidelines posted on our site at:
http://www.tripadvisor.com/pages/userrev_mgmt_rsp_rules.html
We do not post management responses that contain quotations from reviews "Anonymous Traveler .you wrote that Hotel Facilities are fine (free pick up, good breakfast, place, free Palermo tours, Free trekking tours and Free day trips we add) but "it was the worst experience you had"Pity you didnt write your name so we could check if you really stayed at xxxxx or you just looked at our website.
Anyway we have a huge photo guestbook that shows the happiness of our Guests :o)".
Please let us know if you have further concerns.
Best regards,
Dan
TripAdvisor Hotel Relations Team
Posted by: Giovanni | Nov 23, 2009 5:33:14 PM
