TripAdvisor and Blackmail

TripAdvisor.com , the largest online resource dedicated to tourism and travel, is successfully used as a tool to blackmail hotel and B & B hotel owners. The British newspaper The Times is aware of 80 cases in which clients threatened the institution to publish a negative review on the website, in case the management of the institution does not give them a significant discount, or does not release them at all from payment for services.



So, in one of the cases, the hotel owner tried to collect from the resident a fee for material damage caused to the institution, but the resident threatened to negatively respond to TripAdvisor.com and the owner had to retreat.

In another case, the restaurant owner was blackmailed by a client who claimed that he was allegedly poisoned by the food there. The client demanded a “compensation”, in exchange for which he would not publish nasty things to the TripAdvisor institution. The owner refused to pay, and the user, in turn, posted the promised muck. What consequences for the reputation of the institution it led is not known.

Last week, a British court ordered compensation for a bus driver who was deprived of work due to defamation published by someone on tripadvisor.com.



I do not know about you, but I, for some reason, used to believe reviews on the Internet. And when choosing, for example, hotels, reviews of former guests would play a rather significant role for me.



TripAdvisor has launched a new customer support telephone line through which hotel owners will be able to contact, confident that the feedback left by the site visitor is false.

So it goes.

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Read more here .



And more on the topic (from the user Ankheg ): The British Advertising Standards Committee (English: "Advertising Standards Authority") investigates a situation with lies and slander posted on TripAdvisor. According to some reports, the number of "false" reviews can reach 10 million (out of 50 placed there).