TripAdvisor vs. the hotel

Question: I recently found a notice on TripAdvisor about the hotel I manage that said TripAdvisor thinks “individuals or entities associated with or having an interest in this property may have interfered with traveler reviews and/or the popularity index for this property.” Now I’ve received an e-mail that says this is a violation of TripAdvisor policy and in some places a violation of federal law. Neither my staff nor I did anything wrong. Now what?

S. Benham

San Diego

Answer: This is such a tangled issue that it’s best to start not at the beginning but at Step 2.

Go to https://www.tripadvisor.com/help/my_property_has_been_penalized and click on “Owners’ Center” to communicate with the site.

Then go back to Step 1 and read the terms and conditions TripAdvisor sets forth, says Jonathan Harriman, a travel attorney in the Bay Area. If you can fight your way through the stultifying mumbo jumbo, you’ll find that TripAdvisor holds most of the cards.

Does Benham have any legal recourse? “I would say it is a very long, long shot,” Harriman said.

What’s a merchant to do? TripAdvisor could not comment on this specific case, but in response to what raises the red flag, Brooke N. Ferencsik, TripAdvisor’s director of communications, responded this way:

“Our site tools, community of millions of travelers and quality assurance specialists help us flag and investigate suspicious content.”

Um, OK. Others who deal with user-generated content, or UGC, offered some concrete ideas on “tells.”

Michael Francesconi, director of content and community for CitySearch, an online city guide, noted that a change of voice and specificity may be clues. “You’ll start to see a review that refers to a business as if the writer is a customer,” he said. “They’ll switch to ‘we’ and suddenly the voice slips into the merchant itself.” And, he added, if a review talks about how much somebody loves the place and adds, “especially on Thursday when the third margarita is free and it sounds like … [the review] is cataloging the product offering or there’s a sense of trying to plug a business … or it’s far too descriptive,” take heed, he adds

Mark Avnet, professor of creative technology at the Virginia Commonwealth University Brandcenter in Richmond, said beware of marketing speak. If someone is trying to hype, say, a magazine article about appetizers, Avnet said, be suspicious if it says, “This is the perfect appetizer for my dinner party.”

“I don’t know humans who talk that way,” Avnet said. “It’s almost a formal nature to the writing,” he said, instead of “I’m gonna try this and I’ll let you know if it’s any good.”

Nichole Goodyear, chief executive and co-founder of Brickfish, a social media platform that helps brands run branded user-generated content campaigns, said legitimate UGC reviews often are neither all good nor all bad. “If you’re looking at a tent on Amazon, and it says, ‘I love this tent, but the zipper broke after three weeks,’ it’s probably authentic,” she said.

Which leads to the question of whether consumers have too much power. Goodyear thinks they’ve always had it, but much of it occurred “off line” at dinner parties and such. We used to call that word of mouth. Now we call it Facebook or Twitter or any of the hundreds of social media sites we encounter, for good or ill, or, like some of the reviews, a little bit of both.

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