Is that restaurant real? TripAdvisor bedeviled by fake postings. (Image: Jim Glab)
The travel review megasite TripAdvisor hasn’t been very lucky in Europe. It was recently scammed for the second time in three years with postings for a restaurant that didn’t exist.
According to The Local Italy, a restaurant called La Scaletta in the northern Italian town of Moniga del Garda emerged in TripAdvisor listings as the top spot in town for a great meal. But there is no La Scaletta there.
It turned out that local restaurant owners teamed up with the newspaper Italia a Tavola to prove a point: That a restaurant doesn’t have to be real to make a splash on TripAdvisor. So they created a fake profile for the restaurant, and then posted phony reviews — including 10 “excellent” ratings, which was enough to put La Scaletta at the top of local ratings, even though another restaurant in town — a real one — had many more “excellent” ratings.
As soon as TripAdvisor learned about the plot, it pulled the restaurant from its site.
Related: TripAdvisor adds airport ratings
In 2013, the same thing happened to the review site when a restaurant said to be aboard a restored fishing trawler in Brixham, England also got good ratings and a lot of frustrated customers who showed up at the address only to find nothing there. That was a fabrication by a local businessman.
Since TripAdvisor gets so many postings — reportedly up to 60 a minute — it clearly can’t vet all of them, so the credibility of its reviews has been an ongoing problem.
Do you use TripAdvisor’s restaurant reviews when traveling abroad? How reliable have they been? Please leave your comments below.
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Every review site has it share of false reviews. One has to be smart when reading reviews. if there are two many Excellent reviews and the reviewers are all one off reviewers then one needs to read those reviews with a tonne of salt. I may read or skim through 10-15 reviews of a hotel in say Trip Advisor, Booking.com and hotels.com and also look at what else the folks have reviewed on Trip Advisor. One time reviewer gets very little street cred from me
I use both Yelp and TripAdvisor in the US, and primarily TripAdvisor (plus trying to check out local reviews) extensively when in Asia and Europe. Other than the occasional restaurant went out-of-business (but was once legit), no problems with TripAdvisor.
Too bad about the phony Italian restaurant, but I wonder whether this is more the exception than the rule.
I did a Segway tour in Berlin last weekend, and after it was over the guide invited us to post reviews on Tripadvisor. And I mean really, really, really invited us strongly. Apparently they get huge number of customers from TripAdvisor, so TripAdvisor must be doing something right.
I use Yelp and TripAdvisor for restaurant reviews in the U.S. but not overseas, because I generally am so busy sightseeing that that I skip restaurants and graze on healthy snacks all day.
In North America, I reply upon Yelp. Overseas, I use TripAdvisor (after I look at TravelFish) and the results have been OK. (Got me a good French restaurant in Phnom Penh, for example.)
I’ve used it extensively and really relied upon it for travelling, especially in places with a strong language barrier. Why is no one fining these store owners for creating false information?
Interesting. In my own experience I’ve found TripAdvisor quite reliable for hotels, much less so for restaurants.