'One in three TripAdvisor reviews is fake', claims Fakespot website

‘One in three TripAdvisor reviews is fake’: Hotels are accused of trying to manipulate their ratings on the site by paying third parties to give five-star write-ups and rubbish their rivals

Fakespot, a website that seeks to weed out bogus reviews, claims up to a third of reviews posted on TripAdvisor are not legitimate
It says supposedly top-rated bed and breakfasts have almost twice as many ‘fake’ reviews as less favourably reviewed accommodation
TripAdvisor angrily rejected the claims as inaccurate, misleading and unreliable

By Peter Henn For The Mail On Sunday

Published: 23:36 BST, 22 September 2018 | Updated: 23:37 BST, 22 September 2018

Millions of holidaymakers are being misled by phoney reviews on leading travel website TripAdvisor, it has been claimed.

Hotels have been accused of trying to manipulate their ratings on the site by paying third parties to lavish fake praise and five-star write-ups on their establishments – and to rubbish their rivals.

Fakespot, a website that seeks to weed out bogus reviews, claims that up to a third of reviews posted on TripAdvisor are not legitimate. And it says that supposedly top-rated bed and breakfasts have almost twice as many ‘fake’ reviews as less favourably reviewed accommodation.

Millions of holidaymakers are being misled by phoney reviews on leading travel website TripAdvisor, it has been claimed

However TripAdvisor angrily rejected the claims as inaccurate, misleading and unreliable.

Fakespot founder Saoud Khalifa said: ‘I would advise TripAdvisor users to approach every review with scepticism.’

His company uses algorithms to seek the sort of language, posting patterns and account details that suggests a phoney review.

I would advise TripAdvisor users to approach every review with scepticism.

Fakespot founder Saoud Khalifa

Another survey by the British Hospitality Association found that more than half of British hoteliers believe TripAdvisor is ‘not very helpful at all’ at dealing with malicious content.

The website receives 50 million visits from the UK every month and it has been estimated that its reviews influence how £14 billion is spent annually.

While no company has been taken to court in the UK over fake reviews, the owner of a firm that sold fake TripAdvisor write-ups in Italy was jailed for nine months.

A TripAdvisor spokesman said: ‘We totally reject the inaccurate and misleading findings [of Fakespot]. The usefulness and accuracy of the content on TripAdvisor is what has made our site popular to hundreds of millions of consumers. It’s why we fight fake reviews so aggressively.

‘The claims about fake reviews are based on entirely flawed techniques. Their methods are unreliable for one simple reason: they have no access to the technical data you would need to determine whether or not a review is fake. We do – and we have been using this data for over a decade to track millions of reviews.

‘If Fakespot’s methods were in any way reliable, we would be using them. We have tested their analysis, with reviews we know to be either genuine or fake, and the results show it to be completely unreliable and inaccurate.’