Starwood, Marriott and Four Seasons have all launched customer reviews on their websites since October 2011 and others are planning to do the same.

Hilton Worldwide will add customer reviews by the end of this year, according to Chuck Sullivan, senior vice president of global online services.

Holiday Inn parent, InterContinental Hotels Group, will test “verified customer reviews on all of our consumer-facing websites early this year,” states Michael Menis, IHG marketing vice president.

Radisson parent, Carlson, is evaluating options for customer reviews on its brand websites, spokeswoman Joan Cronson says.

Hilton hasn’t decided whether to let customers post reviews on its website, similar to Starwood and Marriott, or to incorporate them from a third party site like TripAdvisor, which is what Four Seasons has chosen to do.

Other hotels are of the opinion that customers will put more faith in reviews where it is certain that the writer has actually stayed at the hotel in question — unlike the reviews on TripAdvisor, which cannot be verified.

TripAdvisor has come under increasing criticism during the last two years, with numerous accusations that reviews have been be faked by owners, or written with malicious intent, or posted by a competitor out to damage the reputation of another hotel.

TripAdvisor today announced it has acquired Holiday Watchdog, http://www.holidaywatchdog.com/, another user-generated travel site in the U.K.

“Holiday Watchdog nicely complements existing content in the TripAdvisor Media Network,” said TripAdvisor CEO Steve Kaufer. “The acquisition is designed to strengthen TripAdvisor’s position as the predominant travel planning resource and adds another strong brand to the TripAdvisor Media Network, a collection of travel media sites.”

Holiday Watchdog will be operated out of TripAdvisor’s London office and there are no near-term plans for integration of content with other TripAdvisor® Media Network sites. The founders of Holiday Watchdog will work through a transition period but have chosen not to stay with TripAdvisor long-term. Terms of the acquisition are not being disclosed.

TripAdvisor claims that Holiday Watchdog will continue to be operated as an independent site.  However, TripAdvisor has  a history of quashing potential competitors before they become a real threat to its virtual monopoly.  Remember TravelLibrary?  Probably not, but it was a user-generated review site competing with TA in the early days, running neck-and-neck for reviews in many markets, until TA bought it and effectively smothered it.  Its review content these days is almost all copied over from TripAdvisor and its previously active “Review” community has largely drifted away.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 30,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 11 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Just days after completing its spin-off of TripAdvisor, Expedia has announced plans to expand its own online hotel reviews.  The big difference is that Expedia says all its reviews will be verified, to the extent that they will all be written by people who have stayed at the place they review.

At the same time, Stephen Kaufer TripAdvisor’s chief exec dismissed public concern over fake reviews, saying, “Based on the scale at which we operate questions of planted reviews is more of a theoretical concern than a practical concern. The scale totally dominates the equation.”  Kaufer was not able to offer a percentage of how many reviews are fake.

From Barbara De Lollis at USA Today’s Hotel Check-in

If you go to Expedia.com today, you’ll find an overhauled review database that contains some 4 million reviews written by people who Expedia says paid for and stayed in the hotel they wrote about.

“We like to call it the new source of truth, internally,” says John Kim, Expedia’s senior vice president of global products.

The strategy plays off recent stories about fake reviews posted on TripAdvisor, Yelp and other sites that don’t confirm whether an author has actually stayed at a particular property – or if they had some other agenda in writing a review.

“(Customers) have been asking for a source of reviews they can trust,” Kim says, citing stories of a “black market” of fake reviews on other review sites. How widely held a belief that is, however, isn’t clear.

“This has tested off the charts in our internal testing,” he told me. “People love the idea that our reviews are verified so you can’t randomly leave a review.”

How do you write a review on Expedia.com? After you’ve booked a hotel on Expedia and stayed there, Expedia sends you an e-mail that contains a link where you sign into your account. At that point, you’ll be given the option of writing a review for that specific hotel.

The company, whose split from Expedia has been expected throughout 2011, is trading under the symbol TRIP.

On launch yesterday Stephen Kaufer, TripAdvisor CEO, rang the Nasdaq opening bell.  The shares were offered at $30 but fell sharply to a low of $27.51,  ending the day at $27.67.

The breakup of Expedia and TripAdvisor has created two distinct companies, although TripAdvisor continues to receive referral fees by promoting Expedia travel businesses on its website.  But free to trade independently of Expedia, TripAdvisor is now in a stronger position  to negotiate deals with other travel agencies.

TripAdvisor has appointed Edelman PR in the UK to defend it against increasing criticism and legal challenges over the credibility of its reviews.

Edelman has been briefed to monitor the hospitality and political landscapes, passing on the message that the site is a ‘trusted source’ and communicating the benefits of TripAdvisor to the UK tourism industry.

How strange that in order to defend its waning credibility TripAdvisor should choose the PR agency that set up fake blogs in the USA to promote another client.

Wal-Marting Across America

A few years ago the Wal-Marting Across America blog documented the supposed adventures of Jim and Laura, a couple traveling the country in a recreational vehicle and camping in Wal-Mart parking lots.

Along the way they chatted with happy Wal-Mart employees, like the guy whose company health insurance saved his son’s life, or the woman who worked her way up from cashier to corporate manager.  Everywhere they parked up they met happy Wal-Mart employees – a surprise as Wal-Mart was notorious for being stingy with wages and benefits.   The blog turned out to be a fake, its pro-Wal-Mart message an invention of the Edelman PR firm.

http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/oct2006/db20061009_579137.htm?campaign_id=rss_topStories

Shortly after,  three contributors to two other blogs were also identified as Edelman employees working for Wal-Mart.

http://www.marketingvox.com/more_fake_walmart_blogs_edelman_fesses_up-022878/

The story of Edelman and Wal-Mart became instant folklore in the world of PR and marketing.  Clearly someone at Tripadvisor has a great sense of humour to employ the same company for this particular PR task!

Beware blogs and people posting stuff in praise of TripAdvisor, folks!

TripAdvisor has announced partnership deals with vacation rental websites  Interhome, Stayz, Toprural and AKENA Technologies which operates MediaVacances.com.

TripAdvisor’s existing rental property inventory includes subsidiaries FlipKey and Holiday Lettings. Since Holiday Lettings was acquired by TripAdvisor in 2010, owners already listed on the site have expressed concern that Holiday Lettings began displaying TripAdvisor reviews without consulting with them first.

With its new partners TripAdvisor’s vacation rental empire will exceed 200,000 properties.

“We are thrilled to partner with these leading vacation rental sites, as each brings exceptional properties and a tremendous amount of local market expertise to the TripAdvisor community. Our goal is to offer travelers the best listings from partners who know the locations best,” said Christine Petersen, president of TripAdvisor for Business. “Our partnership with these global brands demonstrates our belief and commitment to vacation rentals as an important accommodation option for travelers, and we’re looking to partner with elite vacation rental companies worldwide with the aim of enhancing the traveler experience.”

However, the use of anonymous reviews on websites is currently under challenge in the UK where the use of unverified reviews for marketing purposes appears to be in breach of the Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP) non-broadcast code, which states that marketers must be able to show a review is authentic by proving it was made by an identifiable and potentially contactable person.

About TripAdvisor’s new Partners

Toprural

Toprural has one of the largest rural vacation rental databases in Europe and is the leading rural tourism site in Spain.  Toprural has over 50,000 accommodation offers in 10 European countries.  TopRural already allows users of its sites to post reviews without verifying the identity of the reviewer or whether they stayed at the rental in question.

Interhome

Swiss based Interhome includes 32,000 holiday apartments, homes and chalets in 29 countries worldwide.

Stayz Group

The Stayz Group is the largest holiday rental group in Australia, with 40,000 property listings in 1,400 locations

AKENA 

AKENA Technologies, based in France, owns several vacation rental websites, including MediaVacances.com (France), MediaVacanze.com (Italy), MediaVacaciones.com (Spain), MediaVakanties.com (Netherlands) and MediaFerias.com (Portugal).

AKENA also operates ski websites such as Winter-Sports.com (UK), Sports-Hiver.com (France), Sport-Invernali.com (Italy) and Esquiland.com (Spain).

Earlier this year Parliament appointed a Joint Select Committee to consult and report on its draft Defamation Bill; the Committee recently published its report and it contains recommendations that could have a major impact on anonymous defamatory reviews, requiring website owners to remove such reviews on receipt of a complaint.

http://www.justice.gov.uk/consultations/365.htm

The Bill and Internet Defamation

The original draft Bill seeks to rebalance the law in defamation cases between the right of freedom of expression and the right to protect reputation.

However, the Joint Select Committee believes that it does not go far enough in addressing specific issues concerning online content, particularly anonymous reviews.

The Joint Select Committee Draft Defamation Bill Report

http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/joint-select/draft-defamation-bill1/news/publication-report/

Key Points

The committee proposes a series of reforms aimed at ensuring that disputes are generally resolved rapidly by mediation or arbitration, rather than via the courts.

An essential step in encouraging early resolution of disputes is the abolition of jury trials in defamation actions, in all but exceptional cases. Judges will then be required to take key decisions affecting the outcome of the case at an early stage, before massive legal costs are incurred.

The committee proposes to ensure that trivial cases are weeded out at an early stage by introducing a stricter test for determining whether a case is serious enough to go to court.

The Committee recommends that the Government takes action by:

• Ensuring that people who are defamed online, whether or not they know the identity of the author, have a quick and inexpensive way to protect their reputation, in line with our core principles of reducing costs and improving accessibility;
• Reducing the pressure on hosts and service providers to take down material whenever it is challenged as being defamatory, in line with our core principle of protecting freedom of speech; and
• Encouraging site owners to moderate content that is written by its users, in line with our core principle that freedom of speech should be exercised with due regard to the protection of reputation.

In its detailed report the Committee recommends that if the author of a defamatory statement is identifiable then a complainant may take action against the author in order to pursue a legal remedy for the harm that they have suffered.  The process for bringing a complaint will also be simplified.  If the author is unidentifiable, a complaint will place a requirement on the ISP or host to remove the statement, unless the author identifies himself (in which case the aforementioned process applies), or the ISP or host considers the statement to be in the public interest (whereby they have the right to apply to court for exemption from a take-down order).

Excerpt from the report, downloadable in full at http://www.justice.gov.uk/downloads/consultations/draft-defamation-bill-consultation.pdf

NEW NOTICE AND TAKE-DOWN PROCEDURE

101. We propose a new notice and take-down procedure, as indicated in paragraph 93, designed to provide everyone with easy access to the rapid resolution of disputes about online material. It will also help promote a culture which downgrades the credibility of anonymous online material, as discussed below.

102. We are concerned to address some of the problems facing innocent victims of defamatory material on the internet. In particular, a defamatory allegation can spread around the world far more quickly than the victim can react. Posts and blogs are also often written anonymously by users who adopt a generic username and/or email address, or make use of encryption software to mask their identity. Anonymity may encourage free speech but it also discourages responsibility, as people feel free to make abusive or untrue comments without fear of any comeback. We heard a mixed range of views about the feasibility of identifying users by seeking a court order against the host or internet service provider and then investigating the person’s “electronic fingerprint” to reveal who and where they are.[165] It is clear that even where this process leads to the defamer’s identity being known, it is not quick, cheap, or guaranteed in its outcome.

103. The challenges facing regulation of the internet contribute to what some people have described as a new “Wild West”, in which law enforcement is failing to keep pace with technology. Issues of this kind will not be solved overnight. There is, and will be, cultural change as we adapt to the use of new communication technologies. The law needs to respond to this. The precise direction of this social change is unpredictable but we believe it is possible, and desirable, to influence its development, in part through legislative reform. Specifically we expect, and wish to promote, a cultural shift towards a general recognition that unidentified postings are not to be treated as true, reliable or trustworthy. The desired outcome to be achieved—albeit not immediately—should be that they are ignored or not regarded as credible unless the author is willing to justify or defend what they have written by disclosing his or her identity.[166]

Identifiable material

104. Contributions published on the internet can be divided into those that are identifiable, in terms of authorship, and those that are unidentified, as described above. In respect of identified contributions, we recommend the introduction of a regime based upon the following key provisions:

a)  Where a complaint is received about allegedly defamatory material that is written by an identifiable author, the host or service provider must publish promptly a notice of complaint alongside that material. If the host or provider does not do so, it can only rely on the standard defences available to a primary publisher, if sued for defamation.[167] The notice reduces the sting of the alleged libel but protects free speech by not requiring the host or service provider to remove what has been said; and

b)  If the complainant wishes, the complainant may apply to a court for a take-down order.[168] The host or service provider should inform the author about the application and both sides should be able to submit brief paper-based submissions. A judge will then read the submissions and make a decision promptly.[169] Any order for take-down must then be implemented by the host or service provider immediately, or they risk facing a defamation claim as the publisher of the relevant statement. The timescale would be short and the costs for the complainant would be modest.

Unidentified material

105. In order to promote the cultural change we have outlined above, we recommend that any material written by an unidentified person should be taken down by the host or service provider upon receipt of complaint, unless the author promptly responds positively to a request to identify themselves, in which case a notice of complaint should be attached. If the internet service provider believes that there are significant reasons of public interest that justify publishing the unidentified material—for example, if a whistle-blower is the source—it should have the right to apply to a judge for an exemption from the take-down procedure and secure a “leave-up” order.[170] We do not believe that the host or service provider should be liable for anonymous material provided it has complied with the above requirements. If a person who has been defamed can go on to establish the identity of the author (with the help of the courts, online host or service providers) then they may take action against the author in order to pursue a legal remedy for the harm that they have suffered. Where this is not possible, we believe that the law should provide that ordinarily internet material from unidentified sources may not be relied upon by a defendant or claimant in defamation proceedings. Any host or service provider who refuses to take-down anonymous material should be treated as its publisher and face the risk of libel proceedings, subject to the standard defences and our proposals relating to leave up orders. It is for the Government to make clear in the Bill any exceptional circumstances in which unidentified material should have evidential value for the purposes of defamation proceedings. We do not pretend that we are advancing an ideal solution, still less an instant one, but promoting cultural change is an achievable goal that will minimise the damage inflicted by the mischievous and the malicious. Our aspiration is that, over time, people will pay less attention to and take less notice of material which is anonymous.

106. This two-stage procedure should apply equally to online sites that are moderated and those that are not. This is necessary to correct the existing disincentive to online hosts to moderate sites.[171] To achieve this, the Government will need to reform the Defamation Act 1996 to the effect that secondary publishers—such as internet hosts or service providers—shall not be treated as becoming liable for allegedly defamatory statements solely by virtue of having moderated the material or the site more generally. Liability should be determined by the way in which the host or service provider responds to a request for a defamation notice or a take-down order.

In a challenge to the use of anonymous reviews in marketing and publicity, Kwikchex claims that existing advertising rules mean TripAdvisor reviews cannot be used for marketing purposes.

A growing number of hotel and tour operator websites have been including TripAdvisor content to help promote their product - e.g. Holiday Lettings, Visit Scotland, Accor Hotels, Thomson holidays.

Owners have expressed concern that sites like Holiday Lettings, on which they have already paid to advertise, are now displaying TripAdvisor reviews without asking the property owner’s permission.  Holiday Lettings was acquired by TripAdvisor in 2010.

In its complaint against the use of TripAdvisor reviews in marketing and advertising Kwikchex cites the Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP) non-broadcast code, which states that marketers must be able to show a review is authentic by proving it was made by an identifiable and potentially contactable person.

From the CAP Code section 3.45 relating to endorsements and testimonials:

Marketers must hold documentary evidence that a testimonial or endorsement used in a marketing communication is genuine, unless it is obviously fictitious, and hold contact details for the person who, or organisation that, gives it.

Kwikchex co-founder Chris Emmins said: “It’s absolutely apparent that reviews are not being verified and that they are being used for promotional purposes. We think that verifying testimonials is key to fulfilling the requirements of the CAP code.”

The code allows testimonials and endorsements to be used by third parties (such as Holiday Lettings, Thomson et al) from a “published source” such as TripAdvisor without permission of the author, but the code then also places responsibility on the originator of the review to authenticate it.

In the submission Kwikchex makes reference to a number of cases in which it believes the CAP code is being breached, including the use of TripAdvisor reviews on the Accor, Thomson and VisitLondon websites.

Caterer & Hotelkeeper and Kwikchex announced recently that TripAdvisor has launched a customer support telephone number for  registered owners and managers.

Hotel, B&B and restaurant reviewers have frequently criticised TripAdvisor for the difficulty they have contacting the company in the event of  malicious or fake reviews – is this a sign that they are doing something positive to help?

Unfortunately, early feedback indicates that the “helpline” staff refuse to deal with complaints about reviews.  According to Kwikchex a typical response to an owner calling them concerning reviews has been, “He advised me that the line was not for complaints about reviews, there was another department but that he could not put me through to anyone.”

The explanation may be that the UK telehone numbers provided for the supposed ‘helpline’ are actually the existing numbers for TripAdvisor’s Business Listings team.  

The telephone numbers in question have only ever been for contacting the business listings team, to ask about buying a business listing or to answer queries about business listings . They have never offered general support.  If this has changed, maybe someone at TripAdvisor ought to tell the people answering the phones about it!

Just in case, for any owner who want to give it a go and contact TripAdvisor on this number, the UK contact details are as follows:

Monday-Friday
9:30 AM – 5:00 PM EST
0800-098-8460 (Toll-Free)
+44 (0) 203 318 5019