A U.K. Regulatory Board Is Forcing TripAdvisor to Change its Advertising

It's fascinating to compare the different ways in which TripAdvisor is regarded by (a) the press and the regulators of Britain, and (b) the press and the regulators of the United States. Here in America, no one seriously challenges the claims of TripAdvisor to provide accurate reflections of hotels and resorts. Over there in Great Britain, the opposite is the case. Last week, the Advertising Standard Authority of Great Britain issued an extraordinary ruling that TripAdvisor can no longer claim that all of its reviews are "honest, real or trusted" or that all its reviews are by "real travellers." The ASA has demanded that TripAdvisor make big changes to its advertising.
 
Side by side with the regulators, the British press keeps up a steady drum-beat of vehement exposés of reviews appearing in TripAdvisor. This week, the Telegraph has printed a long critique, pointing out that TripAdvisor's reviews can frequently combine, in the same review, both a five-star rave about a particular hotel with a statement that the same hotel "is the worst in the world".
 
"The time has come," the British newspaper continues, "for a re-think on how they [TripAdvisor] verify their reviews. At the very least, anyone that wants to leave a review must prove that they have stayed or eaten at the given hotel or restaurant. All the ASA ruling has done is highlight the need for such a change."
 
Meantime, the Irish Times of Dublin has printed an even more damning indictment. It tells how an employee at the Carlton Hotel Group of Ireland  e-mailed dozens of its employees, asking them to take photos of various rooms to be inserted into fake reviews submitted to TripAdvisor. That way, a mass of favorable reviews would appear in each of the write-ups of the chain's hotels. Employees were cautioned to use crude cellphone cameras for taking the shots, and to send in the reviews on computers that had no association with the hotels or the group. (When Carlton's lawyers heard of these instructions, they apparently forced a withdrawal of the pronouncement.)
 
To all these reports, TripAdvisor has responded with sanctimonious claims of the extreme measures they allegedly take to weed out phony comments from their website, comments either pro or con. No convincing proof is offered of their ability to spot these invented claims. But they apparently continue to oppose any demand that they require their reviewers to show proof that they have actually stayed as guests at the hotels in question, and such a procedure is the only one that could cut down drastically on false raves or critiques.
 
I have earlier written of my own inability to make heads or tails out of various TripAdvisor reviews that I have read. How do you reach a judgment about a hotel if ten people call it a sheer wonder and ten other people call it a fleabag? Even when such contrasts are absent from a particular review, how wise is it to rely on the judgment of a sheer amateur who has been, once in their lives, in a particular hotel--and has been to no other nearby hotels?
 
I will continue to seek out the appraisals of experienced critics who have a reputation for the worth of their opinions.