TripAdvisor has been told it cannot claim all of its reviews are written by real travellers. The Advertising Standards Authority said claims that all reviews on the travel site are genuine are "misleading". The ruling came after complaints highlighted statements on the TripAdvisor website which claimed: "reviews you can trust" and "more than 50 million honest travel reviews and opinions from real travellers around the world".The complainants said that TripAdvisor did not verify the reviews and therefore could not prove that they were genuine or from real travellers. They said that consumers would take the claims on the website to mean they could be certain the reviews posted were from genuine travellers.
TripAdvisor said they used "advanced and highly effective" fraud detection systems but were told not to claim or imply that all the reviews that appeared on the website were from real travellers, or were honest, real or trusted....or from people who even stayed in your hotel as happened to us!!!
