Five hundred thousand euros (or $610,000). That's the fine recently levied on TripAdvisor.com by a regulatory commission in Italy. The famous website's violation? The alleged failure to police its hotel reviews to prevent totally fabricated critiques from appearing. Throughout Europe and Great Britain, numerous public watchdogs and private groups have brought major accusations against TripAdvisor.com, in sharp contrast to the silence of most American public officials and journalists other than Frommers.com.
We will of course be claimed to have a self-interest in criticizing TripAdvisor.com. We're associated with travel guidebooks that compete with TripAdvisor.com (and other "user-generated" websites such as Yelp.com) in recommending or castigating hotels and restaurants. And I can't deny my own self-interest in the matter.
Having admitted that, I'm still astonished that so many intelligent travelers have confidence in the appraisals appearing in TripAdvisor.com. To me, it's self-evident that a large percentage of the comments appearing in the user-generated listings have been generated by hotels and restaurants singing their own praises or viciously criticizing a competitor. Human nature makes it obvious that hotels/restaurants will submit their own fake reviews or else make-up entirely fabricated criticisms of their competitors. They would be foolish not to do so. And indeed, one hotel executive in Australia was recently unmasked as the author of dozens of fake reviews concerning his own hotel, which the "user-generated" websites slavishly copied.
Now, both TripAdvisor and Yelp vehemently deny this is a problem; they plan to fight the fine levied by Italian regulators. And both claim to use various secret methods of winnowing out fake reviews (though both refuse to reveal exactly what it is that they do, claiming that to do so would alert the evil fabricators). And some journalistic commentators have claimed that both websites use mysterious mathematical "algorithms" to distinguish honest reviews from made-up ones.
To which I reply in language so profane that it can't be printed here. No arithmetical formula on this planet can cull out fake reviews from honest ones.
To offset or challenge my opinion would require that both services first demand that the authors of their reviews state the exact dates when they stayed at a particular hotel or ate at a particular restaurant (which, as far as I can see, they don't do). If they did, they would then have to contact the hotel or restaurant to determine whether the author of the review was telling the truth. And would the hotel or restaurant cooperate? Unlikely. Many of them—expecially restaurants—don't maintain a later list of who patronized their services. And most of them would probably and automatically issue a flat denial that any of the review authors stayed or ate with them.
So there it is. If you still believe that the reviews appearing on TripAdvisor or Yelp are all legitimate, then you will also believe in the tooth fairy or Santa Claus. And if you follow those reviews religiously, then you will also be interested in a Brooklyn Bridge that I can sell you.
Photo credit: Tori Rector/Flickr