Italy Slams TripAdvisor with $600K Fine Over Business Practices & Fake Reviews
Jennifer Billock December 24, 2014
An Italian regulator has fined TripAdvisor $600,000 for improper business practices and allowing false property reviews on the website.
On Monday, the antitrust authority in Italy slammed TripAdvisor with a $600,000 fine for poor business practices. The fine was the result of a consumer protection agency and national hoteliers group complaint. The Federalberghi Federation of Hoteliers claimed that TripAdvisor does not have adequate controls in place to stop false reviews, which makes the site’s promotions as authentic and genuine content unethical.
TripAdvisor has been given 90 days to rectify the situation, although the company plans to appeal the antitrust authority’s findings. According to TripAdvisor, the company currently has a team in place to detect fraudulent reviewers, as well as automated tools that seek to prevent false reviews. TripAdvisor believes this current system is extremely effective and catches what it considers to be the “small minority of people” trying to cheat the system.
The Federalberghi Federation is pleased with the outcome of the complaint, and backed up their concerns by providing multiple defamatory reviews currently on the website as evidence. The group has represented hoteliers in Italy for than 100 years and takes a vested interest in the economic and social issues tourism entrepreneurs run into on a daily basis.
This is not the first time TripAdvisor has come under fire for this same issue. One U.K. regulator previously tackled the British version of the site, stating that the company should stop promoting all the British reviews as written by reliable independent travelers.
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Which site is that? Please share always happy to get miles. Also find I really have to take trip advisor as a 50/50 thing. Do the positives outweigh the negatives and if eveyone else had a clean room why did a few find the place so dirty? Like - that you can see your friends reviews. Was once horrified to find family members had swamped Amazon with amazing reviews of a relatives horrible book. Nothing surprises me now..
Another review site I write to regularly (because each review gets 100 miles mostly) do have an effective internal control systems. Positives reviews get posted rather quickly (although on occasion they do ask for verification of stays - like invoices or confirmed reservations). Negative reviews takes longer to post but they do in the end.
I generally go to TripAvisor and look at the positives and negatives, and weigh the relative numbers and how they are written. MANY years ago, I had a very minor role in the DARPAnet; almost no one in the organization thought it would ever be bigger than a disseminated command and control network - were we wrong! Perhaps the Italian hoteliers have had a nerve struck? If management, services, and facilities were good, there would be very few negative comments. Most people do not post "fraudulent" reviews, rather some people do post hyperbolic reviews when a hotel missed the mark badly.
Come on! Lets start suing Wiki for false content! Tripadvisor needs to be taken with a grain of salt. How is Tripadvisor seriously expected to know if a person has actually been to a given hotel? If you don't know to ignore the hateful things written on the internet well you may deserve to miss out on a wonderful hotel experience. If ALL the reviews are negative then just maybe, it might be slightly true.
On the TA forum I am most familiar with, you can apparently ask your friends to conveniently sign up and immediately post a positive review after any negative review of your service/property, but if someone points out that is just a bit "fishy", the post is quickly removed and the poster banned. Also on that forum, designated Destination "Experts" have a few days' experience in their destination and/or get their information from the internet, not personal experience, but comments are not phrased to reflect that. The whole thing is a sham, IMHO.