Trip Advisor Being Sued Over Claims of False Reviews
When it comes to travel, user review sites have proved a complex challenge for business owners. While these sites have become utterly invaluable tools for travelers, they’ve also been an issue for some property owners dealing with negative or defamatory reviews.
Trip Advisor, arguably the most popular travel review site on the web, is being sued over claims that there are false allegations published about businesses on the site, according to HotelMarketing.com.
This type of allegation is nothing new in the world of user reviews. Ideally, any user review site has a system in place where suspicious reviews are weeded out by a variety of different processes, including the ability for other users to flag them. Trip Advisor does allow the ability for users to “report problems with a review”.
The whole point of a user review site is that the law of averages comes into play – so, one negative review likely won’t affect an average rating, as long as the rest of the reviews are mostly positive. However, there’s always the issue of potentially false reviews making their way into the mix, hence the lawsuit.
In particular, this lawsuit is dealing with accusations of food poisoning. Kwikchex, the group initiating the lawsuit, alleges:
“We have found many thousands of anonymous posts on online review sites that accuse specific businesses of being responsible for food poisoning. These posts are unproven and in almost all cases are unreported to the proper authorities.”
Accusations of food poisoning are definitely a serious matter – so is this lawsuit the right way to go? Will this lead to some sort of system where users have to prove they were customers in order to write reviews? We’d love to hear your thoughts!
Stay tuned for a blog post about the Top Five Ways for Business Owners to Handle Negative Reviews.
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Jack Potter, Tasmania October 30th
Some other websites do not allow you to post a review unless you booked the accommodation through their website.
Doug Greenshields November 25th
How hard would it be for tripadvisor to verify their members and get them to put their name to their comments. This would weed out almost all the bogus reviews.
I signed up to a blog site last week and i had to give my phone number, then the site texted me a code to put in to my account, how hard is that?
Erhard Rohrmoser January 14th
We are Lodge Owners in South Africa. (Poseidon Beach Lodge) We have very bad reports in our Tripadvisor Revies of People what never stayed in our Lodge. Possibly our competion or people what gave false credit card details and could not book into our place are able to write any nonsense to make damage to an establishment if they feel to do so. On top of that they are able to use others to make more fake reports to increase the damage and to carry out a revenge battle. As Establishment we tried to contact Tripadvisor but did not get an aswer at all. Sometimes we get threatened from some reckless fraudulent people to give them a big discount or they would write a bad report in Tipadvisor. I dont understand why the industry is supporting this kind of system. It is not reliable at all. If I look to the reviews of booking.com who provides us with a lot of bookings we have a ranking in reviews of 8.9 out of 10. In other review systems we have similar rankings but only from People who stayed in our Lodge.These reviews are done by real customers because they get approached after their stay. If it is too hard for Tripadvisor to confirm that someone stayed in an establishment they should focus on something else. To allow to give false reports or to damage others reputation is also not a solution.
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