When you read a TripAdvisor review, you hope it's been written by someone who wants to help you make a good decision about where you should eat or where you should stay. We now know though, that the authors of a high percentage of TripAdvisor reviews have other motives.
Last year, I wrote a couple of pieces about the scale of TripAdvisor dodginess in Vietnam's capital, Hanoi. I see no evidence of improvement.
And why would there be? TripAdvisor responded to my piece giving themselves a pat on the back for the quality of their fraud detection, which they insisted was rigorous and effective - despite mountains of evidence to the contrary.
You can read one of the blog pieces and TripAdvisor's response here.
TripAdvisor may be comfortable with their fraud detection efforts, but there are few days that pass where I’m not reminded of their shortcomings.
Here in Saigon and elsewhere in Vietnam, new restaurants openly invite guests for free meals in exchange for TripAdvisor reviews. One restaurant even stipulated on Facebook that intending reviewers should have a high number of TripAdvisor “badges”. We can only assume that “badges” are not awarded on the basis of reviewer integrity.
The most brazen recent example of dodgy review practices that I’ve spotted was in a popular Saigon restaurant. Diners were promised a 10% discount in exchange for a TripAdvisor review. It was posted on the restaurant blackboard (see the photo).
The diner would show his or her review to the cashier for a discount.
While helpful to the restaurant’s TripAdvisor ranking, it’s unlikely that reviews generated this way will be of much use to the wider travel community.
TripAdvisor’s guidelines state that “Offering incentives such as discounts, upgrades, or any special treatment in exchange for reviews” is considered fraudulent activity. How might TA police such things you might ask? And what effort is made to alert travel businesses to TA's conditions?
While a large successful restaurant should know better, I don’t really hold it against them. These practices have become so ubiquitous that businesses in the travel space rightly view TA as a big game - less connected to food quality or service than getting out the vote - the positive reviews - by any means.
Most of these businesses wouldn't be spending much time thinking about the integrity of the TripAdvisor community. They already have a sense this isn't a major TripAdvisor priority.
I haven’t named the restaurant because to do so might imply it’s doing something unusual. The only thing unusual about their approach is that it’s so brazen. And in the big story of TripAdvisor scamming, this is peanuts.
The more astute players run their scamming out of the public eye. They pay for positive reviews and they pay for attacks on their rivals. Disgruntled former staff and otherwise unbalanced trolls also get to have their go.
Businesses on TripAdvisor can expect to receive plenty of attention from the company’s sales staff, selling business listings and distributing awards and stickers. The compliance unit seems to be less well resourced.
It’s a variation of the game travel businesses, including publishers, play with Google search. They focus their energy on high search rankings at the expense of quality information.
There’s a poor correlation between high TA rankings and the best hotels, resorts and restaurants just as there is a poor correlation between the highest ranking travel sites in Google search and quality travel information.
Algorithms are very successful at dealing with uncontested facts - the date, the time, the weather. After watching both TripAdvisor and Google for years now, it’s clear that when you get into areas like travel, where a huge amount of money is at stake, there are big resources available to game the algorithm. From my experience, neither Google nor TripAdvisor are very good at working out what is legitimate and what is not. (I’ve written about Google's travel search results before here).
Too often rankings on both are more a reflection of the determination of businesses to rank highly, rather than their intrinsic quality.
TripAdvisor is almost always ranked number one in Google travel search queries.
Travellers would be far better off if both TA and Google were much better at what they do.
TripAdvisor, already one of the most powerful businesses in travel, has grand ambitions to dominate the sale of hotel rooms and tours. As far as I can work out, the company has a single asset of value - the readiness of people of integrity to provide their labour, without charge, in a belief that they are contributing to a community of equal integrity.
Most genuine contributors to TripAdvisor I speak with haven’t come around to the idea that they are serving an unaccountable, for-profit corporation, that shows scant interest in honouring their honest labour, by dealing seriously with rampant fraud.
I wonder how long TripAdvisor’s golden asset - the goodwill and unpaid labour of genuine contributors - can continue to flourish in these circumstances?
Disclosure
I elected not to name the restaurants referenced in this article since their infractions are relatively minor in the industrial scale scamming of TripAdvisor - much of which remains a mystery to me. And these minor inducements are ubiquitous. At least the restaurants referenced here require that their reviewers dine in their restaurants. As TA is so central to the success of many travel businesses, they may reasonably claim that they have no choice but to "play the game". My concern is more with TA's lax processes than with restaurants.
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