Your article on TripAdvisor (Ever been fooled by a rave review?, 8 July) got me thinking back to why I started the site in the first place. Until then, unbiased information sourced from travellers had not been easy to find. While professional critics served a purpose to the handful of businesses selected for a review, for millions of other businesses they left a huge gap of information.
Fast forward 16 years, and our community of reviewers has done more to improve service standards and help small hospitality businesses grow than professional reviews ever could.
Despite this, there are those who say our model should change to require customers to present a receipt before they can express their opinion. But most attempts at review fraud are committed by the very people who have easiest access to receipts – a small minority of business owners trying to boost their own profile unfairly. Far from catching fake reviews, aAll it would do is censor genuine customers who, quite innocently, don’t have or can’t find their receipt.
We are not blind to the challenges a site like ours faces. We have invested heavily in fraud detection technology and personnel to improve the safeguards we have in place.
We don’t claim to be perfect. But we know that for the vast majority of people using TripAdvisor, the information they are able to gather from our community’s reviews is both useful and accurate.
Stephen Kaufer
TripAdvisor CEO and co-founder
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