TripAdvisor Falls Foul of the Wisdom of the Crowds

TripAdvisor has just found itself with a little problem in the UK. It's one that will spread (although still be UK only) to other such user recommendation sites and poses something of a problem for the basic "Wisdom of the Crowds" business model.

That is, how do you know that those claiming to review something (an hotel in TripAdvisor's case) have actually been to or tested the thing being reviewed?

This is what the Advertising Standards Authority has picked up on in this adjudication:

Assessment

Upheld

The ASA considered that consumers would understand the claims "Reviews you can trust", "… read reviews from real travellers", "TripAdvisor offers trusted advice from real travellers" and "More than 50 million honest travel reviews and opinions from real travellers around the world" to mean that they could be certain that the reviews posted on the site were from genuine travellers, and accurately reflected those travellers experiences of the places they visited.

We noted that reviewers were asked to agree to a declaration that their review was their genuine opinion of the hotel and that they had no personal or business affiliation with the hotel, or been offered an incentive to write a review for it. We also noted that reviewers were not asked to similarly confirm that they had no competitive interest in the place they were reviewing, or were posting a review on behalf of a competitor or other interested party, and we did not consider that agreeing to a declaration in itself would necessarily prevent non-genuine reviews from being posted on the site. Notwithstanding that, we understood that reviews could be placed on the site without any form of verification, and that whilst TripAdvisor took steps to monitor and deal with suspicious activity, it was possible that non-genuine content would appear on the site undetected.

We noted that TripAdvisor allowed hoteliers a right of reply to critical or negative reviews posted on the site and that they believed that users of the site had a healthy scepticism as a result of their experience of review sites more generally. However, we did not consider that consumers would necessarily be able to detect and separate non-genuine reviews from genuine content, particularly where a hotel or other establishment had not received many reviews, and nor did we consider that a hoteliers response in itself would go far enough to alert consumers to, and moderate, non-genuine content.

Because we considered that the claims implied that consumers could be assured that all review content on the TripAdvisor site was genuine, when we understood that might not be the case, we concluded that the claims were misleading.

The ad breached CAP Code (Edition 12) rules 3.1 (Misleading advertising) and 3.7 (Substantiation).
Action

The ad must not appear again in its current form. We told TripAdvisor not to claim or imply that all the reviews that appeared on the website were from real travellers, or were honest, real or trusted.

Note that this only refers to the way in which TripAdvisor can advertise the site in the UK: it does not refer to anything else at all. They do not need to change their methods or their business model.

But it is an interesting conundrum, isn't it?

How do you, how can you, verify that all of those contributing to such sites actually have direct experience of what it is that they are reviewing?