No melon is ever ripe enough for TripAdvisor

When TripAdvisor guests reviewed the Ritz in London, their views ranged from one to five stars. And that’s what’s wrong with the site.
 

“In fact, those reviews of the Ritz sum up all that is simultaneously brilliant and annoying about TripAdvisor: its celebration of consumer power, of the right for everyone’s opinion to be heard and accorded equal weight; and the bewildering contradictions in its reviews,” said Jared Blank, a travel commentator and user of TripAdvisor.
 

The consumer review site has become one of the world’s biggest travel resources, attracting 41.6 million users a month and featuring 40 million reviews of hotels and restaurants worldwide, as a story points out in the Sydney Morning Herald.
 

But the pettiness and hysteria of some of the complaints baffle analysts such as Blank.
 

With its dense tangle of information on everything from the size of the towels to the brand of coffee a hotel uses, the site has become a bramble patch to negotiate, writes The Herald.
 

Perhaps no one is more annoyed by TripAdvisor right now than entrepreneur Duncan Bannatyne, who is considering legal action against the site, which he has called ”despicable and cowardly,” according to The Herald.
 

Bannatyne complained that a ”dishonest” review compared his Charlton House spa hotel in Somerset, south-west England, to Fawlty Towers, and asked TripAdvisor to remove the posting.
 

He says publishing defamatory or fake reviews is a threat to hoteliers, who cannot fight back.
 

A spokeswoman for TripAdvisor, Emma O’Boyle, issued this statement:
 

”We offer hoteliers the opportunity to respond to every review written on TripAdvisor. However, in the case of Bannatyne’s hotels we have had several worrying examples of individuals being intimidated by Bannatyne and his hotel representatives. TripAdvisor has a zero-tolerance approach on bullying as we defend the freedom of speech.”
 

The current size of the site was not imagined when it was started 10 years ago in Massachusetts, after an experience by its co-founder, Stephen Kaufer, while booking a holiday to Mexico.
 

He had gone to a travel agent and been given three brochures ”but I had no idea when this travel agent had last been to this destination,” he said in an interview last year. ”And obviously she was getting paid to send me to those places.”
 

So he set up a resource allowing people to say what they really thought about their holiday experiences.
 

If TripAdvisor has caused frustration among consumers, it has sparked fury in the travel industry – Bannatyne is not alone, says The Herald.
 

Some hoteliers are enraged about the material posted about them and are fighting back.
 

An ”online reputation services” company called KwikChex, acting on behalf of more than 1000 hoteliers, says it estimates there are at least 27,000 legally defamatory comments on TripAdvisor, ”allegations that are false and should, if necessary, be tested in court.”
 

A travel expert and writer who runs the website The Indie Traveler, Sara Benson, says she loved the site when it first started, because ”it was full of savvy people, who were very technocratic and experienced travellers but now it’s such a tidal wave of raw data that it almost makes you want to give up.”
 

By David Wilkening