Many travelers will eventually end up on TripAdvisor when planning their vacation. It has become the Google of the travel world, where people go for honest, unbiased reviews of hotels, restaurants, sights and activities by fellow travelers. Except the information on TripAdvisor is anything but honest and unbiased, and it’s only getting worse.

 

If you’ve only seen the good side of TripAdvisor, be prepared to swallow the red pill. Ignorance isn’t bliss when it comes to vacation planning. The purpose here isn’t to rant, but to provide information travelers can use to make better decisions when planning a trip, and to raise awareness in general about how TripAdvisor’s profit-driven practices affect both travelers and small businesses.

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What Every Traveler Needs to Know about TripAdvisor

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1. Created in 2000, TripAdvisor built its brand on the trademark “World’s most trusted travel site”. But after countless lawsuits in multiple countries, by 2013 TripAdvisor quietly removed the words “trusted” as well “honest” from all of its website marketing (now it’s just the “World’s largest travel site”).

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2. An entire industry of “reputation management” companies exist which businesses can hire to create highly believable fake reviews, “fix” their reputation if they’ve received bad reviews or sabotage their competitors. To prove how easy this is, a fake restaurant in London reviewed itself into #1 spot in the restaurant ratings.  If you think it's a fluke and could never happen again, you would be wrong.

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3. Even when reviews are posted by honest travelers, there are many good reasons why these are still completely useless to the average traveler when trying to plan a trip. 

             

4. Hotels which opt to pay for TripAdvisor’s hefty “Business Listing” package get preferential treatment, increased visibility and “access to traffic”, no matter their reviews, rankings and ratings by travelers.

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5. Hotels can’t ask for their listing to be removed, but unless they pay for the pricey Business Listing subscription TripAdvisor removes the hotel’s contact information (phone number and website) from the listing (so users have to go on Google to find their phone and website).

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6. Hotels, restaurants and other small businesses can lose a significant part of their business if they receive fake negative reviews or get red-flagged by TripAdvisor for “suspicious activity”, yet they often have no recourse except to take the website to court, and many simply don’t have the financial resources to do so.

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7. TripAdvisor prominently positions the tours and activities which can be booked through Viator, a company it bought in 2014, at the top and center of their pages. These companies listed on Viator pay 20–30% commissions. So TripAdvisor is blatantly promoting their own companies’ business listings above companies which are independent, even if the latter have better reviews and ratings by the anonymous users.

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8. TripAdvisor encourages travelers to book directly through its own website booking system but takes zero responsibility for any issues with the service booked when travelers experience problems (ie overcharged on their credit card, show up with a booking confirmation but the hotel has no record, etc). This is compounded when booking through TripAdvisor for tours, because they then go through Viator’s system instead of directly to the actual tour company.

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Summary: A complete lack of transparency, follow the money.

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To put it all of these points into context, TripAdvisor started in 2000 and built a huge following as a “trusted source of travel information”. Once it gained a dominant share of the market, the number of fake reviews skyrocketed, resulting in multiple court cases around the world. But instead of taking measures to verify and guarantee the reliability of the reviews, they simply changed the “trust” slogan to “the biggest” and began making money as a booking engine, charging companies for preferential visibility, acquiring the booking engines like Viator to profit from the tours they supposedly recommend without bias, and pressuring companies to give up 20–30% of their sales in commissions for added “access to traffic”.

 

The lack of transparency hurts travelers because they think all of the businesses are fairly represented on TripAdvisor, and because their size and power now mean they are too big to ignore, pressuring small businesses to work “with” them in order to protect their business reputation. Travelers also don’t realize that when they use third-party booking sites that it represents a serious bite into any business’s revenue, and they make up for that by charging more, so eventually the consumer ends up paying for TripAdvisor’s commissions - 1.78 billion dollars last year.

 

TripAdvisor’s Fake Reviews & Blatant Bias​.

 

The ugly truth is that no one knows which reviews are fakes. So now we’re getting into the truly shady side of TripAdvisor. There have been countless articles of the high number of fake reviews on their website. How do they do this without getting caught by TripAdvisor’s anti-fraud team? There are companies based in faraway lands where, for a fee, they can expertly game the system to give you good reviews and your competitors bad reviews. And they know how to make the reviews look believable and “reliable”, despite TripAdvisor’s unverified claims that they can spot the fraud. 

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TripAdvisor pressures businesses into participating. I think TripAdvisor leaves these reviews up just to force business owners to respond. Did you know there’s no way for businesses to opt out of being on TripAdvisor? Anyone can create a listing for a business whether the actual owner “participates” or not. And there is a huge push behind the scenes by TripAdvisor to convince owners that they need to “manage” their page by adding photos, videos, and interacting with the reviewers in order to maintain a high rating, then post the TripAdvisor widgets on our websites and stickers in our windows to promote our businesses. 

 

They also ask us for our clients’ emails in order to send them automated emails “reminding” them to submit their TripAdvisor reviews. Just in case you missed that, TripAdvisor asks businesses for your email so they can contact you on their behalf to ask for reviews. Am I the only one who finds it unethical to share my clients’ email without their permission? TripAdvisor markets all of this as “services” for businesses listed on their site, but we’re just really promoting the TripAdvisor “brand”, as if they represent anything other than the anonymous and often unreliable mob at best, and a bunch of desperate or unscrupulous business owners committing fraud at worst. Again, with zero responsibility for anything posted on their site, TripAdvisor wins no matter what happens in their gladiator arena.

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Now that TripAdvisor can no longer claim to be the most trusted source if travel information, they’ve decided to use their power as the “World’s largest travel site” to squeeze money from businesses who never asked to be on their website in the first place.

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TripAdvisor has become the big bully of the travel playground

 

Did anyone else notice they changed the game? I don’t think TripAdvisor could care less about whether you actually read or trust the reviews anymore. They were just the free bait to get us in the door. While we were busy trying to decipher ambiguous reviews or obsessing about rankings, TripAdvisor used its amassed fortune to buy up every property on the Travel Monopoly board (14 to date, including FlipKey, The Fork, Cruise Critic, and Viator). They now dominate every profit-making corner of the travel industry as the ultimate gatekeeper — or, more appropriately, tollbooth operator — between independent travelers and the companies we’re trying to find. Where once we might have trusted TripAdvisor as a place to find unbiased information about hotels, restaurants and travel services like tours and cooking classes, now they own the booking engines, earning commissions on every transaction through the TripAdvisor website as well as fees charged to companies using those booking engines if they want “access to traffic.” Travelers should know that the hotels, restaurants and travel services heavily promoted at the front and center of any given TripAdvisor page most likely paid to be there, which is a blatant conflict of interest if they expect the user ratings to mean anything at all.

           

Hotels and Tour Companies who Pay Get Preferential Visibility on TripAdvisor        

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Outright lies? “We never have and never will give our advertisers or anyone else preferential treatment.” says TripAdvisor on their Content Integrity Policy page.  But then Trip Advisor states that hotels who pay for a Business Listing fee get preferred placement and “access to traffic” on TripAdvisor, as well as their full contact information (website and phone) displayed, whereas those who don’t pay have no information except an address. If a traveler wants actual info they have to Google the hotel’s name to find their website. It’s like paying the mob for “protection”.

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The contact information is clearly listed in one, and not the other. But even for those who do pay, TripAdvisor still puts their info in tiny grey print, while their own “Check Availability” booking engine button is bright yellow. Hotels which don’t participate in the booking systems that give TripAdvisor huge commissions have claimed that the “Check availability” button on their hotel page says there are no available rooms and recommends other hotels instead. Hotel owners have created websites such as TripAdvisor Watch to reveal what goes on behind the scenes (including blackmail by customers and legal battles with TripAdvisor lost because the hotel couldn’t afford lawyers), but generally hotels, restaurants and other travel industry professionals can’t speak out because they’re afraid of what TripAdvisor can do to their business. So travelers get to anonymously attack businesses with no accountability, but the businesses themselves have nowhere to safely speak out against TripAdvisor. Who is policing the police here?

                                                

Fooling travelers into paying higher prices. Viator is to guided tours and activities what The Fork (or Open Table) is to restaurants, except that Viator’s commissions are a whopping 20% of the tour price. When they started out, they only allowed certain companies to join, there was an application process and not all companies were accepted. Now that they’re owned by TripAdvisor, anyone at all can list their tours, so there is zero filtering, no quality assurance.

 

If you go directly to Viator site, you can’t even cross check the tour company on other sites or that company’s own site, because Viator only reveals the name AFTER you have paid. I’m assuming they do this so you can’t bypass them and book directly with the actual business, which is just shady and wrong.  Caveat emptor, book at your own risk. And it’s no surprise TripAdvisor gives preferential placement on its website to only tour companies using Viator.

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They’re a business, not a charity, right? I have no problem when sites offer value and make money from that. But the money only flows in one direction on TripAdvisor, and the game was rigged from the start to make it almost impossible for a business to refuse to participate, because there’s no level playing ground. TripAdvisor sells itself as a meritocracy where every business is fairly ranked and rated according to trusted reviews, but the companies who don’t pay for a business listing get penalized.

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As TripAdvisor has become the largest travel site in the world, travelers are unwittingly using it like they use Google. But Google clearly marks ads, and does not charge website owners a fee for their link to be “clickable” in the search results (uh oh, better not give them any crazy ideas!).

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TripAdvisor doesn’t support responsible or sustainable travel. Like most mass-market travel companies, TripAdvisor and Viator funnel commissions taken from local businesses out of the local community. When you purchase a bike tour on TripAdvisor 20% of that payment goes to a corporation in Massachusetts, not to business owners living and working in the town your visiting. Purchasing services from small businesses through booking agencies goes against the basic tenets of sustainable travel. It also results in higher prices overall when small businesses with tight margins have to raise their prices to compensate for the large cut taken by booking agencies like TripAdvisor.

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Conclusion: What can responsible travelers do about it?

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TripAdvisor isn’t going away anytime soon, and it’s unrealistic to expect travelers or business owners to ignore it completely. The goal of this article was to make travelers aware of TripAdvisor’s business practices.

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• Obviously take the reliability of any anonymous reviews with a huge grain of salt. 

• In the food pyramid of travel planning, think of TripAdvisor as mass produced junk food and keep it limited to a small percentage of your daily intake. Make sure the majority of your travel information comes from trusted, verified sources (where the information is by a travel journalist or blogger with a track record you can check).

• ​Whenever possible, book hotels, tours, restaurants, cooking classes or any other travel service DIRECTLY with that business. TripAdvisor knows we’re so busy we prefer the easy one-click option on their site (even if the price isn’t cheaper), but by booking direct you are helping support small businesses (and they’re happier to have you as a client), keeping overall prices down, and cutting out the middleman in the communication and accountability chain in case something goes wrong.