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‘We’re clean’ pledges Tripadvisor

May 25, 2007 | Online Travel

The hotel review website is often accused of being corrupted by 'planted' reviews - but bosses claim it's the best it can be.

Tripadvisor.com has defended the integrity of its hotel reviews following suggestions at a conference today that fraudulent reviews are still being published.

The robust defence by senior executive Marc Charron was two-fold. Firstly, he claimed that the site is getting more sophisticated at detecting false reviews - and secondly that its readers are savvy enough to ignore bogus entries.

It’s not the first time that Tripadvisor has been called to account over its veracity. As the largest website for user hotel reviews, the site receives around 1,400 reviews a day, and in the past has been criticised for allowing reviews to be published that are not posted by genuine guests.

In its defence the site has always claimed that it has sophisticated algorithms that detect abuse, and that it carries out spot checks and investigates reports of abuse by its readers.

But going one step further today Charron, Tripadvisor’s managing director for Europe, told a gathering of travel executives at the EyeForTravel conference in London that “no reviews go unmoderated”.

Get the full story at Times Online

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