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The case was eventually dropped after the American apologised for "repeatedly false and untrue statements These reviews were written out of anger and malice". American faces jail in Thailand over hotel review. US man avoids Thai jail over bad resort review. Thai national park sends rubbish back to tourists. Thailand country profile. Image source, Getty Images. The hotel is located on the Thai island of Koh Chang. Now TripAdvisor has hit back.
Thus, in promising a faithful portrait of the world, TripAdvisor has, like other tech giants, found itself in the unhappy position of becoming an arbiter of truth, of having to determine which reviews are real and which are fake, which are accurate and which are not, and how free speech on their platform should be.
It is hard to imagine that when CEO Stephen Kaufer and his co-founders were sitting in a pizza restaurant in a suburb of Boston 18 years ago dreaming up tripadvisor. In this sense, the story of TripAdvisor, one of the least-examined and most relied-upon tech companies in the world, is something like a parable of the internet writ large. T he travel guide is an ancient genre, one that has never been far removed from the questions that trouble TripAdvisor LLC. For nearly all of human history, people have wanted to know everything about where they were going before they got there.
The Greek geographer Pausanias is often credited with authoring the first travel guide, his Description of Greece, sometime in the second century AD. Over 10 books, he documented the sights and stories of his native land. When TripAdvisor was founded, in — six years after Amazon, four years before Facebook and Yelp — consumer reviews were still thought of as a risky endeavour for businesses, a losing bet.
Amazon first allowed customers to post reviews in , but it was a controversial move that some critics derided as retail suicide.
When TripAdvisor launched, it did so as a simple aggregator of guidebook reviews and other established sources, keeping its distance from the unpredictable world of crowd-sourced content. But as an experiment, in February , he and his partners created a way for consumers to post their own reviews. Soon, Kaufer noticed that users were gravitating away from expert opinion and towards the crowdsourced reviews, so he abandoned his original concept and began focusing exclusively on collecting original consumer input.
From late , every time a visitor clicked on a link to a given hotel or restaurant, TripAdvisor would charge the business a small fee for the referral. By , TripAdvisor had 5 million unique monthly visitors.
For the next few years, TripAdvisor continued to grow, hiring more than new employees around the world, from New Jersey to New Delhi. To cement its dominance, TripAdvisor began buying up smaller companies that focused on particular elements of travel. Today, it owns 28 separate companies that together encompass every imaginable element of the travel experience — not just where to stay and what to do, but also what to bring, how to get there, when to go, and whom you might meet along the way.
Faced with such competition, traditional guidebook companies have struggled to keep up. It transcends borders. B y , TripAdvisor was drawing 50 million monthly visitors, and its parent company, IAC, decided that the time had come to spin it out as a separate, publicly traded entity. TripAdvisor was in new and uncertain territory, and no one knew how the company would fare on its own.
TripAdvisor had become a tech giant, but its leadership did not quite realise that yet. The suit was tossed out in , after the judge ruled that any review posted to TripAdvisor is an opinion and therefore protected under the first amendment. TripAdvisor had become an established giant of the travel industry, an inevitable part of even the most cursory vacation planning.
As the company sought to clean up its public profile, its audience grew, but so did the pressure to turn a profit. On the forums, which are still organised into pixelated manilla folders reminiscent of earlys computer graphics, users seek out companionship and camaraderie.
On the Disneyland Paris forum , one of the most active communities on the site, people swap stories of when they first fell in love with the park, which they affectionately call DLP. How fantastic that everyone can now see the park as it once was! Tripadvisor manually moderated more than , additional reviews related to Covid travel issues. Almost 1m Tripadvisor reviews in found to be fraudulent Guardian. Review Transparency Report Tripadvisor.
How to spot fake reviews on travel sites Washington Post. This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here.
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