Tripadvisor fined in Italy over fake reviews
 

Tripadvisor was fined €500,000 in Italy for misleading and false reviews published on their website. The fine was specifically for Tripadvisor Italy, and the issues seem to be that 1) they don't do enough to keep fake reviews off their site; and, 2) they don't warn that the reviews are not necessarily posted by verified guests.

The initial complaint was lodged by an association of hotel owners, so they must be annoyed by bad reviews. I don't think they complained about the many hotel reviews that say, "It was the highlight of my trip!"

Tripadvisor announced of course that they would appeal and said that they had a rigourous mechanism for ferreting out false reviews.

On Trip Advisor, I have read scores of reviews for certain "family resorts" in southern Italy which have an unusually high number of "sterling reviews", all seemingly posted by Canadian visitors! I've wondered myself about the veracity of such postings.

There are very few review sites I put any faith in at all and Tripadvisor is certainly not one of them. Neither is this (Fodors) forum.

Unless I know the person who is writing the review personally, why would I assume that A: They know what they are talking about or B: That their taste is in any way similar to my own.

Someone who works for a magazine, newspaper, website or is just adding a review on a site like Tripadvisor writes and says, 'restaurant X is great with wonderful food'. I'd say there is a 1 in 10 chance I would agree at best.

Now if Michelin lists that restaurant, then yeah, I would expect to agree that the food is wonderful. Any review is no better than the knowledge/expertise of the reviewer and the degree to which it is in line with your own experience/expectations.

I'm glad to see they got fined. Too bad so many people don't know any better than to look at their site for reviews. It would just seem to me to be common sense that you don't blindly believe what some stranger says about a place. But then if common sense were 'common' in that everyone had it, then the phrase 'common sense' would have no reason to exist.

The other website issue I get a laugh at are all the ones that purport to find you the lowest airfare or hotel price. They can't all be right. But people happily advise you to use Travelocity or Hotels.com or CheapOAir, etc. etc. etc.

They should all be fined for misleading advertising as far as I am concerned.

Agree with PP
Never post on or trust TA

There are very few review sites I put any faith in at all and Tripadvisor is certainly not one of them. Neither is this (Fodors) forum.>>

which rather begs the question, SJ, why you bother to turn up here at all.

<<The initial complaint was lodged by an association of hotel owners, so they must be annoyed by bad reviews. I don't think they complained about the many hotel reviews that say, "It was the highlight of my trip!">>

Alternatively, they were annoyed by the great and in their eyes unjustified reviews that their competitors were getting.

I usually check the hotel reviews on www.booking.com and www.venere.com (an Italian reservation site that was bought by Tripadvisor). They at least accept reviews only from people that were verified guests at the hotel. Of course, some people will complain about petty things or expect luxury at hostel prices, or rave about things I don't care about. I can usually form a basis for judgment from reading multiple reviews, blending them, and adding salt.

Even Tripadvisor's reviews are useful if you discount the raves and the rants and critically read the others.

I doubt that the fine will stick after the appeal. Probably TripAdvisor will agree to put a caveat on their review pages and beef up their monitoring.

I still trust reviews, you just have to be smart enough to decipher the bs. If it is from a new poster with no reviews or very little then I ignore. The TA forums have very good info if you follow long enough. I have been helped far more than not.

Well I won't go so far as to say never. I've had some good experiences with recommendations from both TA and Fodor's. I just look for certain criteria on the reviews I read. Also I think exchanging the private e-mails with people who post on the TA forums can work too.

I trust the people on Fodor's. There are only a couple of flacks to be aware of, but 99% of the people give their honest opinion, whether you agree or not, is another matter.

On Booking.com and Expedia.com they will send you a questionnaire after you have stayed at the hotel. We have used Booking in about 10 countries and only one hotel did not live up to the what was said.

Not only is TA full of lies, that and Yelp have many people who have not idea of which they speak. I look at cities, countries, restaurants, I know well and measure the reaction. It is just people trying to act knowledgeable and sophisticated.

I never read TripAdvertiser. I'm sure there must be some useful reviews there, but I haven't found them. Between the fake reviews and the ads, I'm amazed anyone uses the site. I "know" many of the posters here (especially on the Asia board) so know that their reviews are real, and often know whether I would like a place that they liked or not.

And I agree that Yelp is worthless.

I have used the travel forums on Trip Advisor and have found them an important source of information. The local experts are excellent. As far as hotel and restaurants reviews, I use them too. It doesn't take an especially keen intellect to sort through the relevant and real reviews and those posted by those with a personal interest or dispute. Of course, it's a good idea to use several different sources in order to make the best choice.

I often find value in TA reviews, but of course I don't believe everything I read there. Many of the reviews give me hints of things to look for in other reviews or when looking at a hotel's website.

I agree with bvlenci and others who say there is lots of useful information on TA, booking.com, etc as long as you read a number of reviews and listen to the majority and are smart enough to disregard the picky stuff and the things you don't care about. I've been booking hotels based on reviews from these sites for years and have almost always felt the hotels were just what I was expecting.

I find picking hotels based on TA, booking.com and venere.com reviews much more reliable than the 'reviews' from Fodor's and other major guidebooks.

I always read reviews on Tripadvisor for hotels. I am keenly interested in comments about the quality of wifi, noise issues and room temperature. The fake negative reviews are usually so over the top, telling tales of bugs and filth, they look fake -- but it was the failure to police for negative reviews that caused Tripadvisor to get fined. Too many rivals were conducting vendettas against other businesses, and they were more than annoying. They were ruining businesses.

For restaurants, the Michelin guide is actually a poor guide to restaurants in Italy unless you want 3 star restaurants, which serve a kind of Michenlized food. Using Italian guidebooks is a much better bet, and even if you dont read Italian, you can figure out the gist and see prices. I don't put any stock in TripAdvisor or Yelp restaurant reviews when it comes to others judging food, but I read them and the Italian reviews on TripAdvisor and Yelp as well, to get some idea if the restaurants is noisy, cramped, unairconditioned, prone to padding the bill,, etc.

Most TripAdvisor restaurant reviews are for places near hotels, and for Italy, most show an astonishing lack of understanding of regional Italian dishes and seasonal eating, etc. Most TripAdvisor and Yelp reviews in Italian (and on other social media sites) complain endlessly about prices and service -- and are equally unreliable when it comes to judging food quality, although Italians generally order much more knowledgeably.

I've written a few reviews on TA and gave my opinion with specifics and descriptions whether it was a restaurant or lodging. If I was a little disappointed in a meal, I said exactly why and which dish(s) I ordered. If I really enjoyed something - the same, exactly what and why.

Same with lodging.

That said, I've been on Fodor's for many years and have found some long time posters whose taste and travel style are very close to my own. I happily admit to following along on some of their itineraries - with a detour of my own here and there!

"which rather begs the question, SJ, why you bother to turn up here at all."

Really annhig? Do you think I come here to read reviews? It's a forum, not a review site. A forum is for discussion and while that might include discussions on places to stay or eat or how to buy an airline ticket, it is not limited to those subjects.

I read another thread today that asked what restaurants to try for Tapas in Barcelona or somewhere. I didn't bother answering but if I did, my answer would have been simple.

Don't eat in any place that tour groups go. Go into the Tapas bars that are obviously full of locals. That's all you need to know. Having some middle aged housewife from Omaha say the tapas in X were wonderful means nothing to me. Nor do I think it should to anyone else unless she is their Mother.

I am happy to provide factual information about places I know that someone asks about on a forum but that to me is simply 'dues paying'. I come to forums to discuss travel in general and in more philosophical terms. That's what interests me.

Why do people pack too much? Why do people believe they must follow a pre-planned itinerary? Why do people insist on thinking they can 'visit Europe' in 2 weeks rather than thinking in smaller and actually doable terms?

Where to eat in Barcelona? Who cares, I know I will have no problem finding good food anywhere if I simply use my brain and not look to strangers to tell me where to go.

Why favorite criticism of a tapas bar, and I think it was Yelp, not TA, "The portions were too small."

I remember a similar case in Scotland a few years ago. But this was brought by an individual hotelier against Trivadvisor for a fake review. I don't think it got resolved as the legal costs for the hotelier were unsustainable against TA'a financial resources.

This past May we spent some time in eastern Sicily as part of our annual trip to Italy and after conversing with many restaurant people, it seems they were very fearful of Tripadvisor. Every person told me that the main problem, in their opinion, was the ability of anyone to make a negative post when they've never visited the establishment.

After exploring the castle on top of the mountain in Calatabiano, I asked the owner of a restaurant where we stopped for lunch for her business card so I could make a post on Tripadvisor. She was in a panic and told me she didn't have any. I tried to reassure her the post would been positive, but she was really scared. Her chef came out and explained their fear because the posts can mean the difference between success or failure and their competitors can make negative, ficticious posts. By the way, we did enjoy our lunch there.

Businesses do deserve negative reviews if they've earned them,but the significant impact of Tripadvisor seems unfair and dishonest when it's possible to make totally false accusations. The positive aspect of agencies like venere.com or booking.com is that you must have stayed at the property before you can create a review.

Buon viaggio,

Rbciao47, you make a very good point about the power some websites have today to influence people and thereby affect a business.

There should be a legal 'duty of care' that would force such sites to 'police' their reviews etc. but that is very difficult to achieve since the internet spans all countries obviously. I think more countries should be taking sites like Tripadvisor to task.

All the traveller can do is ignore sites like Tripadvisor as unreliable. If you don't click on their site and thereby give them 'hits', the advertisers will stop paying to advertise on their site. That is after all how they make their money. So vote with your finger (don't click on the site)and hurt them in the wallet which is all they care about obviously.

I wonder if some people don't post negative reviews just for "fun". For a large hotel, it seems strange that a competitor would think that his over-the-top negative review would outweigh the hundreds of other reviews.

I think that Fodors has more in-your-face ads than Tripadvisor does. Half of the "You might also like" things at the bottom of the page are third-party ads, and there are the big banner ads top and bottom. On the Tripadvisor forum pages, at least the ones I frequent, there is a smallish banner at the top and none at the bottom. Then there is the "You recently viewed", and an invitation to download the Tripadvisor App, which I suppose are semi-ads. Still, there are fewer ads than on this forum. And Tripadvisor doesn't email ads to me, as Fodors does.

Yelp is only good for addresses and phone numbers. The reviews are usually biased and ignorant or are power trips by the writer.

Tripadvisor is more problematical. I ignore the numerical number 17 of 306 places in Podunk data. I ignore all content-free reviews (This place is great/awful) with no details. I doubt all reviews that concentrate on naming the wonderful staff members, and those that actually state they didn't use the place. Then I throw out the reviews from one-post reviewers. I also ignore the reviews that say this is the best/worst place I have ever eaten at or slept at.

If the review is detailed and well written showing tastes similar to mine, I check others by the same writer. And I check other sites for the same place. The hotel sites that only post from verified users are, of course the best. Restaurants deserve a cross check at Chowhound, although the bias there is toward expensive and cutting edge. (If every review is anout the raw fish, well, Mrs. P won't go).

The best thing I can do is write a long, detailed, honest review of any place I go to so there will be something on TA that others can rely on. Yelp, however, is a lost cause.

It's true that Italian reviewers tend to complain about restaurant prices and service, much more than the foreign reviewers. Perhaps it's because most of them come from smaller towns and are used to being among the few diners in a restaurant; and prices are definitely lower in the provinces away from the tourist trail.

I also see significant differences in the hotel reviews. One complaint I often see from Italians is about the presence of wall-to-wall carpeting, which Italians just don't like at all. I've never seen it in a private home. I suppose it's understandable in a country where people wash all their floors at least once a week.

Someone earlier mentioned the subjective nature of reviewers, especially in rating a hotel. For example, when we are in Milano, which we happen to really like, we always stay Hotel Berna on Via Napo Torriano, about 400 meters from the Stazione Centrale. It is a 4 star property, extremely clean, the staff is excellent, it serves the most generous breakfast in the city, and is very well located for our needs. One individual left a scathing review about the hotel becauuse she did not like the car service the hotel found for her at her request. The car service had nothing to do with the hotel's amenities, but she still rated everything as terrible-awful.

Opinions are like noses...everyone has one and everyone's version of nice is not the same. We still plan on staying at Hotel Berna in August, 2015...regardless of the car service the hotel has no control over...

Buon viaggio,

I read reviews on Booking. com , but sometimes one is not sure if the people are writing about the same
hotel...
Had a few good recommendations here (re hotels,) some restaurants Fodorites raved about left
us cold.

When we look at reviews for places where we live or visit frequently, we are usually apalled by the rankings and reviews as we find them way off base.

Having discussed this with hoteliers, it seems that in Italy at least many negative reviews on TA are written by young people on weekend breaks who don't even know about their own country's idiosyncratic star rating system.
I frequent Italian spa towns and many hotels are exasperated by negative reviews based - for example - on the fact that the hotel "was full of old people".

I apparently stand alone in finding TA's reviews helpful. The trick is to read the reviews while using a few brain cells.

If, for instance, 20 people say "X had a great breakfast," then I generally believe it. If a criticism seems totally stupid -- as in one I saw for a hotel in central Milan: "No parking available" (no kidding) -- I ignore it.

The best reviews tend to be mostly fact-based and not opinion-based (though it's hard to exclude opinions totally): "The hotel has a nice rooftop bar, but the drinks are expensive." "They charge for Wifi." "There a high noise level in the rear room of the restaurant."

I would say that in the maybe 5 times I've used TA as a guide to choosing an accommodation, the reviews have been helpful and on the mark.

BTW, How does the Italian government intend to enforce and collect the fine? I mean, what's the plan if TA says, "Get lost"?

I apparently stand alone in finding TA's reviews helpful. The trick is to read the reviews while using a few brain cells.
____

If the people who wrote them had brain cells, it would be much easier and more trustworthy.

Agree with VINCENZO. Use your head people!!!

Well Vincenzo doesn't stand alone in finding TA's reviews helpful. Several of us above said essentially the same thing. The fact that the site is as popular as it is tells you something. Many people find the reviews helpful. It's the REVIEWS not the RATINGs that are useful. It's not that hard to figure out which reviews are fake or just stupid. Some of the information in the reviews is even more useful than the info on hotel's own websites or the booking sites.

The fine was for the Italian affiliate of TripAdvisor, so I would imagine they could easily collect the fine, if it holds up on appeal.

I used to post on the NYC TA board and 95% of the people wanted basic advice. They rarely ventured from the major sights and they were not interested in trying ethnic foods they did not know, art galleries, smaller museums, etc. These were not sophisticated travelers. And when I looked at Spain TA, I would say 80% were interested in the resorts in the south. I was surprised how few even were interested in Madrid and Barcelona.

If I may......part of the point is perhaps being missed here. Most of the replies above are looking at it from a US-centric position. We are talking about Tripadvisor Italia, and if you care to click on the Italian language button on TA's website you'll find a whole world there of reviews and forums in Italian. There are thousands upon thousands of reviews of Italian hotels written by Italians. Whether prospective Italian customers are as expert as others in distinguishing between fake and genuine reviews I don't know.
The fine was dished out by the Italian Antitrust regulators so I imagine their investigation was thorough.

I love t.a. I have found some of my fvorite places with their help. Most of above is true.....and of course there are fakes...same with travel agents and a concierge...you must read between the lines.
I particularly apreciate seeing pictures of things like the breakfast or a view from rooms. I post these often as well. I am a fan...but it is just one of many tools...

The reviews on the Italian TA site have all the merits and faults of the American version. If you want to see those reviews, you don't need to click on the Italian language. There is an option to sort the reviews by language, so that you see the reviews by Italians first. The reviews will be automatically translated into the default language of your computer.

Italians have different points of view about hotels and restaurants. One example I gave above (for hotels) was the distaste for carpeting. And they go ballistic if they end up in a hotel that doesn't have bidets. In the restaurant reviews, they don't mention at all whether there were any foreigners present.

I've noticed that in many reviews on the English language sites, people say things like, "Apart from us, all the other diners were locals." By this I presume they mean that they were all Italians, because it's unlikely that they recognize regional Italian accents. I can assure you that most of the Italians dining in the centro storico are not locals, they're mostly Italian tourists in from the provinces, and don't know any more about restaurants in Rome than you do. In fact, they may know less, as Italian tourists are not very likely to research their restaurants in advance or to read reviews. They are much more likely to consider price as a primary consideration than foreign tourists are. They usually just want a decent meal at a reasonable price, with fairly quick service.

Apart from pizza, which Italians rarely eat at home, restaurant meals are considered by the average Italian to be at best an acceptable substitute for a good home-cooked meal.

IM: >>If the people who wrote them had brain cells, it would be much easier and more trustworthy.<<

I just haven't reached your level of sophistication on travel reviews. I shall endeavor to do so.

I like TA but tend to ignore all the 1 and 5 star reviews (well, actually, I read the 1 stars for entertainment purposes only) and put more faith into the central reviews, but filtering out the nutso ones.

The small rating distribution graph's shape is also important to me. But everything has to be taken in conjunction with other available information such as on booking sites (booking.com, expedia, etc.). End result is very few poor experiences for me.

A TA contributor has just had the courage to open a thread similar to this one on TA's Italy forum itself.
I wonder how long before it will be removed?!

Too late folks! By my watch it lasted 43 minutes.