Five stars – says who? My trouble with TripAdvisor

It was in a small seaside town in Croatia that my dislike of TripAdvisor petrified into loathing. The site’s top listing wasn’t one of the ad-hoc shacks down by the beach that sold the freshest fish grilled over wood (where my nose would have led me), but we went along with it all the same. Never before or since have I eaten in a restaurant where our hosts fished the meal from a vast chest freezer in full view. Remember to write about us on TripAdvisor, they urged as we dolefully paid our bill, giving us a free liqueur that tasted of Cif and cynicism.

Despite the fact that virtually every week brings a new story about how useless TripAdvisor is, how it enables users who are corrupt/greedy/mendacious, the site trundles on like a marauder, spewing an ever-increasing volume of freely given, unpaid “content”, as it has since its conception in 2000. Despite all evidence to the contrary – in 2013 its CEO, Stephen Kaufer, pocketed more than $39m – TripAdvisor has convinced its contributors that it is “one of us”, like a digital version of Nigel Farage or Donald Trump.

Regardless of the fact that it is riddled with fakes and idiots, a huge number of otherwise sensible people continue to give credence to the aggregated opinion of, at best, unqualified strangers. A 2015 government-backed Competitions & Markets Authority investigation found that UK consumers spend more than £23bn a year after reading online reviews. “Only a very small proportion [of respondents] felt that it was ‘not very likely’ or ‘not at all likely’ that the reviews were written by genuine customers,” the report concluded.

Personally, I don’t hate TripAdvisor because of the bully-boy tactics or rapaciousness with which it is associated. I don’t hate it because it enables reviews of and tickets for cruel animal attractions, or for its climate of blackmail-enabling entitlement. I hate it because it’s shit. At the time of writing, the top restaurants in Glasgow and Manchester are, respectively, a bog-standard chicken tikka masala-punting Indian and a fairly obnoxious American-style joint. Topping the London list is an upscale outfit described by my informed critic counterparts as “ploughing through stubble and foam” and “fine dine like it’s 1999”, followed by an average-looking French restaurant in Battersea with an idiotic portmanteau name. None of these, in my considered and (yep, sorry) expert opinion, is worth crossing the road for, let alone town. Although there is comedy in the fact that an Irish caff in Greenwich is ranked more highly than Restaurant Gordon Ramsay.

I hate the implicit pressure: on small businesses to sign up or pay the price, to put buttons on websites and stickers on doors, the fact that even the inadvertent user is bulldozed into downloading the wretched bloody app. I hate TripAdvisor because the top listing in one Italian town was utterly fictitious. Because it gives awards to hotels like the Tunisian one closed months earlier after 38 holidaymakers were shot dead. Because there is a whole industry dedicated to churning out fake, by-the-yard “reviews”.

As the American travel journalist Heather Stimmler-Hall has noted, TripAdvisor once proudly announced itself as the “world’s most trusted travel site”. This trademark quietly shuffled away in 2013, possibly something to do with a wave of lawsuits and a ruling by the British Advertising Standards Authority that the site was “not to claim or imply that all the reviews that appeared on the website were from real travellers, or were honest, real or trusted”. The unfortunate corollary of this is that TripAdvisor can’t now be held accountable for what it describes as “a few fake reviews”. Win!

Reading many of the reviews, I have a mental image of a hybrid of Hyacinth Bucket and Viz’s Mr Logic, and that’s just the real ones. A few weeks ago, a contributor called Madeupreviews submitted a review of a greasy spoon in Reading that kicked off with: “I heard about this fine restaurant from a chap at the veg section of Lidl who is kind enough to allow me to flagellate myself with a marrow once a month.” At the time of writing, it’s still there.

It took a while for the powers that be to figure out that the many reviews of The Grand Budapest Hotel might prove problematic for hopeful travellers. (No, it doesn’t exist. There is now a matey disclaimer that suggests they were always in on the joke.) Or reviews of a halfway house for asylum seekers in Cardiff: “If you are travelling far, perhaps in the back of a cross channel truck, or a boat across the Med, then this is a lovely place to stay.”

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Gary Usher, chef and owner of restaurants Sticky Walnut in Chester and Burnt Truffle in the Wirral, has been vocal on social media about his own dislike of the site, and has tested the system himself: “Last week I wrote a spoof review (‘The manager ate my dawg’) to highlight that their supposed fraud prevention is not fit for purpose. I purposely included TripAdvisor in my many tweets, telling them what I was doing. While my ‘review’ was ‘pending’, I was awarded 200 points and a badge.”

Thom Hetherington, CEO of Manchester’s Northern Restaurant & Bar exhibition, agrees: “Sadly, the Manchester top 10 proves it’s not fit for purpose. The list smacks of being driven by write-ups submitted with a variety of possibly questionable motivations, and I don’t see how it could possibly help a newcomer to get a true feel for the city.”

My Observer colleague Jay Rayner has lent his voice to the #noreceiptnoreview campaign, designed to help counteract the proliferation of fake reviews; users are asked not to post without a scanned receipt – to prove they were there, and that they paid. “We all know that TripAdvisor is an echo chamber for the sound of axes grinding,” Rayner tells me, “so it doesn’t even function well as a site for basic information. I used to consult it to get a list of possible restaurants in a city I didn’t know well, paying no attention to the reviews. For Exeter, the TripAdvisor top 30 included the branch of McDonald’s on the ring road. Exeter deserves better. If it doesn’t even function as a source of basic information, what’s the point?”

The #noreceiptnoreview initiative was launched by undercover British food inspector “Tom” (@EaterWriter on Twitter) in a quest for greater transparency. (And, yes, I do see the irony in his anonymity. But such is the juggernaut quality of TripAdvisor for those working in the hospitality industry.) “I felt terrible for business owners faced with fictitious reviews they were powerless to address,” he says. “Hiding behind the legal protection of merely displaying the opinions of others, as opposed to actually having any of its own, TripAdvisor is a brick wall to owners who haven’t asked to be listed, yet cannot be de-listed. They should have the right to know anything written about them is derived from a real, proven stay or meal.” How has TripAdvisor reacted? “Their responses have focused on how hard it would be, for example, for a table of four to be able to post four reviews with only one receipt.”

Tom thinks that TripAdvisor will be damaged by the campaign, but unable or unwilling to do anything about it: “Their arm’s-length, we-don’t-need-you stance with owners is creating a festering dislike that is filtering out into the wider restaurant-going community and mainstream press. The owl is becoming a signpost for fakery, comedy and mistrust, rather than an authority.”

People whose lives and businesses have been damaged by the site’s cavalier approach to fact-checking are also taking matters into their own hands, with sites such as TripAdvisor-destroys.com demanding user verification and Twitter accounts @TripAdvisorSham and @TripAdWarning regularly updating with new evidence of chicanery. I ask “David”, the man behind @TripAdvisorSham, what’s his beef? He tells me: “Most of the vitriol I hear concerns the inability to get fakes removed, ‘reviews’ written by competitors or disgruntled ex-staff. I’ve been caught up in this myself.” What about TripAdvisor’s much-trumpeted commitment to weeding them out? He’s not buying it: “They claim to have advanced proprietary systems to spot fakes, but how can this actually work? They won’t disclose the techniques because we might ‘game them’. Very convenient. And fakes do affect rankings. The ranking system is a joke.”

Then there’s the blackmail: independent businesses threatened by users with the big stick of a bad TripAdvisor review in order to score discounts and free meals. Small restaurants with bottom lines that live or die by a few tables a week are wearily resigned to it: they can’t afford court cases when the site is deaf to their entreaties. TripAdvisor describes blackmail as an “occasional concern” and encourages restaurants to report it before anything is posted. But, as David says: “Their blackmail-reporting feature is useless. It relies on us knowing blackmailers’ names, and expects them to review under those names. It’s laughable.”

Gary Usher tells me what it’s like to be on the receiving end: “The thing I hate most is seeing staff being insulted and having their names put in a bad light online. They have no right of reply. I also find that the reviewers who mention the team in this way were the rudest of guests.” Funny, that.

Please don’t mistake this for the frustrated bleatings of a dead tree media fossil threatened by the mighty onslaught of citizen journalism. For one thing, I am writing this from the perspective of a punter, not a pundit. For another, while I welcome many voices, this internet clamour isn’t turning us into a democratic utopia, but rather something that resembles the film Idiocracy, in which a man wakes up after 500 years in a world of, well, idiots. I’m not against the idea of a source of unbiased, fact-checked, crowd-sourced wisdom. But TripAdvisor ain’t that. With gems such as: “I recoment the Lasange, and the great Fist and Chips”, or men telling us what the lady wife made of the loos, everyone just isn’t a critic.

But it’s good for hotels, you might say. Well, up to a point: it is good for hotels that have buckled to customers’ attempts at extortion, not so much for the small independents, who would rather not shell out. Nor am I interested in the idea that if you spend enough time on TripAdvisor, you’re able to fossick out the sane, sensible voices from the loons, shills and people who’ve incubated a grievance after inadvertently shagging the chef.

When travelling now, I do hit the internet, finding fellow food writers and local experts on Instagram and Twitter, and always benefiting from their generous advice. And in the absence of trusted voices, I’ll do what I used to do: follow my nose. Unlike TripAdvisor, it rarely leads me wrong. Who knows: I might just rebrand it “the world’s most trusted nose”, bung it online, then lie back and count the money.