TripAdvisor.com and the Wisdom of the Clowns

TripAdvisor.com, the aggregator of travelers’ opinions about hotels, resorts and such, has been posting the following warning on some hotel profiles.

This is an encouraging move.

Most people who have contributed or used web reviews of hotels, restaurants and books can smell a rat–or at least suspect one is usually around.

Wisdom-of-the-crowds opinion aggregators are laughably simple to game. How many e-mails have you received from your favorite restaurants begging for a vote in the annual “Best Of” web poll?

As this issue has circulated through the online travel sphere, things have heated up. In response to a few broader challenges to Trip Advisor’s overall integrity, the company’s chief Twitteur, April Robb, issued the following statement, which appeared on the blog Elliot.org:

We believe our nearly 25 million reviews and opinions are authentic, honest and unbiased, from real travelers, which is why we enjoy tremendous user loyalty. Also, the sheer volume of reviews we have for an individual property allows travelers to base their decisions on the opinions of many.

The integrity of TripAdvisor reviews is protected by three primary methods:

1. Every review is screened prior to posting and a team of quality assurance specialists investigate suspicious reviews

2. Proprietary automated tools help identify attempts to subvert the system

3. Our large and passionate community of more than 25 million monthly visitors help screen our content and report suspicious activity

When a review is suspected to be fraudulent, it is immediately taken down and we have measures to penalize businesses for attempts to game the system. Penalties are handled on a case by case basis.

Well, it’s hard not to smell a rat there too. “Every” review is pre-screened and a team of QA specialists “investigate”s suspicious reviews?

That’s a hell of a workload. Assume it takes 15 seconds to eyeball each of the 25 million reviews Trip Advisor says it has. This means that its screeners have spent. . .let’s see…4,340 around-the-clock days, or about 12 years of constant labor, vetting reviews since the site launched.

And that’s before the QA specialists step in to investigate the suspicious ones!

Even if this work is being done in Sri Lanka, that’s still a pretty high “contractor expense” in the ol’ budget.

You can read an excellent report on the Trip Advisor controversy at Elliot.org, the best-of-breed blog by online travel journalist Chris Elliot.

Also check out the 43 comments on his entry. It’s hard to tell without a dedicated team of QA specialists, but damn, I think I smell a rat there too.

It looks to me like several of the comments defending Trip Advisor’s integrity come from. . .wait for it. . .people with some undisclosed relationship with Trip Advisor.