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Courtesy of the Times.
Hotels and restaurants are trying to cheat their way to the top of TripAdvisor amid claims that as many as one in three reviews is fake, The Times can reveal. Independent analysis of tens of thousands of reviews on the world’s best-known travel website shows that supposedly top-rated bed and breakfast hosts at tourist hotspots have almost twice as many “fake” reviews as lower-ranked accommodation. Two thirds of reviews posted about top B&Bs in some hotspots are thought to be suspect. An undercover operation by The Times has caught venues trying to buy five-star TripAdvisor reviews — as well as negative reviews of rivals.
The travel website is popular in Britain with more than 50 million visits each month. A top ten position in a city or area can be lucrative for hoteliers or restaurants, guaranteeing bookings for months in advance.
Consumer groups say that fake reviews are a growing problem. They trick people into buying inadequate goods and services. It is estimated that more than £14 billion a year is spent on travel and hotels as a result of reviews. The investigation found a thriving online trade in fake TripAdvisor reviews. A glowing five-star review costs $50 on reviewsthatstick.com, a site that operates from a base in Asia. Other websites allow customers to bulk-buy reviews at cheaper prices, with one offering ten for £69. This newspaper set up a bogus website selling fake TripAdvisor reviews and paid for adverts to appear at the top of Google search results for phrases such as “buy fake reviews”. Over the next month, the website had hundreds of visitors and dozens of inquiries.
One restaurant owner admitted that he had already posted “a large number of positive reviews” but wanted further help to boost his ranking. He wrote: “I’m looking to improve my TripAdvisor account, I’m currently 3.5 [out of five] and would like to be 4.5 in the next month, please let me know if you can help.”
What appeared to be the most recent honest review of his restaurant gave it a score of one out of five and described it as the “worst meal ever”. TripAdvisor says it invests heavily in detecting fraud and has tools to prevent bogus posts. Critics say that the company has an incentive to allow the practice because stricter enforcement would limit the number of good reviews, which generate bookings.
The Times opened a TripAdvisor account without providing a real name and posted ten fake reviews with no difficulty. TripAdvisor did block reviews, however, when we tried to post multiple identical assessments of different venues. A prankster tricked TripAdvisor last year into rating his garden shed as the top restaurant in London. Fakespot.com, the consumer website that conducted the analysis for The Times, uses an algorithm and machine to identify suspicious reviews. It looks at the language, posting patterns and account details to assess appraisals. A recent study by Cornell University in New York found that computer analysis identified 90 per cent of fake reviews, while humans spotted half. Fakespot’s analysis does not prove that a review is fake or that a venue has benefited from them. Many of the venues listed in TripAdvisor’s top ten rankings appear to have genuine reviews. Saoud Khalifah, Fakespot’s founder, believes, however, that TripAdvisor is not doing enough to weed out fakes. “TripAdvisor has a huge set of problems,” he said. “From our database, the mean of fake reviews is 32.9 per cent. For B&Bs, that rises to 41.9 per cent. There are a large number of accounts with one or two reviews created by people within hotels or restaurants that have posted fake reviews. I would advise TripAdvisor users to approach every review with scepticism.”