TripAdvisor, Inc. In 2016, the company rebranded their attractions listings calling them TripAdvisor Experiences in keeping with trends on Airbnb and Experiences offered range from cooking classes and skip-the-line access to famous attractions to multi-day excursions.

The rooms are tiny and cramped, and we were charged a fortune for breakfast!” My job as a hotel reviewer was not to say a hotel was the best or the worst (even if I obviously had my own opinions on this), but to accurately describe the hotel in a way that each traveler would know exactly what to expect in terms of size, décor, location and included services, preferably using concrete nouns rather than adjectives.

If I know what travelers to Paris don’t know (namely, that most of the anonymous reviews are useless), then obviously now when I travel to a new destination I already know I can’t accurately judge the validity of anything I’m reading on TripAdvisor, so I stick to reputable sources of information.

As a result TripAdvisor had to remove a number of marketing claims from its UK website such as Read real reviews from real travellers”, Reviews you can trust” and More than 50 million honest travel reviews and opinions from travellers around the world”.

Unlike anonymous reviewers, journalists and travel writers know they need to be fair and truthful when writing bad reviews because they can be prosecuted under libel laws for defamation if their claims are unsubstantiated (although there are cases of Yelp and TripAdvisor reviewers being sued as well, with the website owners claiming zero responsibility).