TripAdvisor's business practices under review by FTC as more travelers say their warnings of rapes, injuries were blocked
TripAdvisor's business practices under review by FTC as
more travelers say their warnings of rapes, injuries were blocked
USA TODAY NETWORKRaquel Rutledge, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Published 12:45 p.m. ET Nov. 21, 2017 | Updated 7:58 p.m. ET Nov. 21, 2017
Here's what the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel discovered
about TripAdvisor's vacation service. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Dawn Allison didn’t know when she went to the ladies’
room at Rams Head Tavern south of Baltimore that just two days earlier a woman
had found a hidden camera on the floor near the toilet and gave it to
police.
Allison and her family had been to the restaurant several
times, celebrating Mother’s Day and other family occasions. She never dreamed
anybody would be spying on her while she was using the bathroom.
She found out through a newspaper story a few weeks later
that the owner of the restaurant — a well-known businessman in the community —
had been charged with six counts of secretly videotaping women with their pants
down.
“The first thing I wanted to do was to make sure this was
on TripAdvisor warning people of what was going on,” said Burgess Allison, her
husband. “I posted a short blurb that basically said, ‘Oh my goodness, this guy
is running a Peeping Tom camera.’ ”
Within a day, the post was deleted.
An email from TripAdvisor to the Allisons, who share a
TripAdvisor account, said it didn’t meet the website’s guidelines.
“The first thing I wanted to do was to make sure this was
on TripAdvisor warning people of what was going on.”
Burgess Allison, TripAdvisor contributor who tried to
warn users that a restaurant owner had been arrested for using a surveillance
camera in his eatery's restroom
Until then, the Allisons, a couple in their mid-60s who
now live in North Carolina but used to live closer to the restaurant, had been
frequent TripAdvisor contributors.
The company’s refusal to post what the Allisons
considered important safety information soured their enthusiasm for the site
and sparked a three-year battle that concluded last week when TripAdvisor
published their post — albeit on a forum page for the state of Maryland, rather
than as a review attached to the restaurant where diners would be more likely
to see it.
An investigation by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel,
published Nov. 1, revealed that TripAdvisor had deleted reports of rapes,
blackouts and other injuries and deaths among travelers vacationing in Mexico.
Since then, dozens more people who have traveled around
the world have told the Journal Sentinel that TripAdvisor silenced their
reports of disturbing, sometimes terrifying experiences.
The Federal Trade Commission is now looking into
TripAdvisor’s business practices, according to a letter sent Friday to Sen.
Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., who had urged the agency to take action.
“The Commission has a strong interest in protecting
consumer confidence in the online marketplace, including the robust online
market for hotel and travel,” wrote Maureen Ohlhausen, acting chairwoman of the
FTC. “When consumers are unable to post honest reviews about a business, it can
harm other consumers whose abilities to make well-informed purchase decisions
are hindered and harm businesses that work hard to earn positive reviews.”
On Monday, the president of the International Hotel &
Restaurant Association in Geneva, Switzerland, told the Journal Sentinel his
organization might come up with its own system of punishment for hotels and
other establishments where serious injuries and deaths take place.
On Tuesday, a lawyer in Texas representing the family of
the Wisconsin woman who drowned in January under mysterious circumstances at a
resort pool in Mexico, said he has received about 30 calls in the past couple
of weeks from people who had their negative posts deleted by TripAdvisor.
Aside from uncovering how TripAdvisor had deleted
negative posts, deeming them hearsay, “off-topic” or in violation of “family
friendly” guidelines, the Journal Sentinel investigation found the website’s
policies and practices keep consumers in the dark in a multitude of ways.
Users have no way to know how many negative reviews
TripAdvisor withheld, how many true, troubling experiences never get told.
And it’s difficult for site users to realize that much of
what appears on their screens has been specifically selected and crafted to
encourage them to spend.
Secret algorithms determine which hotels and resorts
appear when consumers search. Some hotels pay TripAdvisor when travelers click
on their links; some pay commissions when tourists book or travel.
An untold number of TripAdvisor users have been granted
special privileges, including the ability to delete forum posts. But the
company won’t disclose how those users are selected.
The $1.5 billion online travel website’s initial public
response has been swift, rolling out a new warning system that marks resorts
where safety concerns have been reported in the media. The company has promised
to make other changes aimed at making it easier for travelers to share their
troubling experiences.
In one case, the Journal Sentinel described how
TripAdvisor repeatedly deleted a post from a Dallas woman who warned of dangers
at a resort in Mexico in 2010 where she had been raped by a man in a security
guard uniform. A TripAdvisor spokesman said the post was rejected because it
violated the company’s “family friendly” guidelines.
Two days after that Journal Sentinel investigation was
published Nov. 3, TripAdvisor co-founder and chief executive Steve Kaufer,
assured the world the company’s policy had changed in recent years.
“Over time TripAdvisor has updated this policy to allow
more descriptive reviews on the site about first-hand accounts of serious incidents
like rape or assault,“ Kaufer wrote in a post on LinkedIn. “When we were made
aware that this user's post had been removed, we republished it in line with
our current policy.”
Kaufer’s statement contradicts the experience a travel
writer from Russia had after she tried to post a review describing how she was
raped this year at knifepoint by a housekeeper at the upscale, exclusive Six
Senses Zil Pasyon in Seychelles, an island off the east coast of Africa.
In June and again in July, she tried to caution other
travelers using TripAdvisor. Despite the criminal charges of sexual assault
filed against the man, her attempts at posting her experience on TripAdvisor
failed.
“I was looking for TripAdvisor people in Russia to give
them my documentation,” said the woman, who asked that her name not be
published because her son and parents don’t know what happened. “There was
nobody to connect with and ask why they didn’t publish it. I write letters to
general mail. I got nothing back.”
The Journal Sentinel confirmed her report through legal
documents and with interviews. The man’s trial is scheduled for next month.
A spokesman for Bangkok-based Six Senses said in an email
that the resort is cooperating with the investigation.
“We are eager to hear the ruling in this case and look
forward to setting the record straight as there are great discrepancies in the
claimant’s account,” the spokesman said.
TripAdvisor did not initially publish the woman’s review
because she didn’t respond to a verification email and then tried to post from
a different email address, the company's spokesman said.
It did publish the woman’s review Nov. 1 — the day the
Journal Sentinel published its investigation.
Among the changes TripAdvisor has promised is to provide
users with more specific information when their reviews and forum posts are
rejected.
Many people told the Journal Sentinel that TripAdvisor
had deemed their posts to contain hearsay, but the emails notifying them that
their posts would not be published did not explain what language in their
reviews violated the guidelines.
In addition, the company has vowed to better train
moderators to be more consistent in how they apply the guidelines.
As for the new program that flags hotels and
establishments where health, safety and discrimination issues have been
publicized in the media, the company has issued four to date — all resorts in
Mexico where travelers reported sexual assaults, blackouts and deaths to the
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
An internal committee decides which places will get the
“badges” — which the company tentatively plans to keep posted for three months,
according to TripAdvisor spokesman Brian Hoyt. It’s unclear exactly how the
decisions are made.
The company will focus on places where there have been
credible media reports of problems and where owners, employees or contractors
are responsible, rather than guests, Hoyt said.
For example, the case of Erin Andrews, a TV sportscaster
and co-host of Dancing with the Stars, who was secretly videotaped by a stalker
while she was naked in a hotel room wouldn’t qualify, he said.
“So if Harvey Weinstein attacks somebody in a hotel room,
that’s not something we’d badge,” Hoyt said. “It’s not something the hotel has
under its control.”
Andrews sued the owners and managing company of the
Nashville Marriott, saying they could have prevented the incident. They should
have told her that a man requested the hotel room next to hers, the lawsuit
argued. Last year, a jury awarded her $55 million and found the hotel to be
partially to blame.
If any resort needs a warning badge, it’s the Grand Oasis
in Cancun, according to Maureen Webster of Woburn, Mass., and Karen Smith of
Bradenton, Fla.
The two women have been trying for years to caution
travelers about staying there. Both of their adult sons drowned six years apart
under suspicious circumstances at the resort’s pool.
A young woman drowned there in 2012 as well, and Mexican
news reports indicate an employee of the hotel was murdered while working
there. Travelers have also told the Journal Sentinel they blacked out after
drinking small amounts of alcohol there in recent months.
Webster and Smith were blocked from reporting their sons’
deaths on TripAdvisor because they weren’t traveling with them. TripAdvisor
considered their comments hearsay.
“It’s not hearsay that my son died at this resort,” Smith
said. “It’s not hearsay that the resort refused our phone calls and emails and
would not help us get any information, whatsoever.”
Representatives of Spain-based Oasis Hotels & Resorts
did not respond to repeated requests for an interview.
Smith was encouraged in early November when she tried
again to post on TripAdvisor. She had heard about the company’s new policies
and the chief executive’s stated commitment to ensuring information about
safety is easily shared.
“Stay away,” she wrote. “My son tragically died while
vacationing here. He drowned in waist-high water in the late afternoon after
consuming a few drinks at the swim-up bar. … No one from the resort would speak
with us.”
She received an email from TripAdvisor the next day:
“Your review of Grand Oasis Cancun has been published!”
Success, at last, she thought.
Four days later, the post was deleted.
Hoyt said reviews are meant to be first-hand accounts of
travelers’ stays at the various properties.
Those rules have been in place for years, he said. The
families can post their comments in the forum section but not as a review tied
to a specific hotel.
But the company is striving to improve its policies, Hoyt
said.
“We’re always looking to make enhancements,” he said.
“There’s not a person who doesn’t feel for these families who lost a child.
“It’s something we’re grappling with and talking about.”
Nor has TripAdvisor slapped a badge on Rams Head Tavern.
Prosecutors alleged the owner, Kyle Muehlhauser, was
secretly recording women pulling down their pants and sitting on the toilets in
three different bathrooms over three years. Muehlhauser pleaded guilty in 2015
to two counts of visual surveillance with prurient intent.
When the Allisons initially tried to post information
about the restaurant, they were told it violated TripAdvisor’s “family
friendly” guidelines. The Allisons edited the post to remove the “Peeping Tom”
language.
TripAdvisor then said they were posting in the wrong
place.
A TripAdvisor representative told them to post it instead
in a forum for Savage Mill, Md., where the restaurant was located. No such
forum existed.
When the Allisons tried again, the TripAdvisor
representative said, they were too late. It had been more than a year since
they were at the restaurant.
Ultimately, the secret videotaping of guests was not the
type of information TripAdvisor wanted to publish, the Allisons concluded from
email they received in August 2015.
“As I stated before — TripAdvisor is not a news agency.
If we were to allow all members to report all crimes, accidents, deaths, or
injuries sustained in any destination, it would be impossible for our members
to locate information that is actually travel-related and relevant to that
destination,” a TripAdvisor staff member and moderator identified only as Jane
wrote in an Aug. 26, 2015, email.
Vivek Krishnamurthy, an instructor at Harvard Law
School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, said most user-review sites have issues with how they
are moderated. From inadequate staffing to training and culture, problems
persist.
A federal law passed in 1996 called the Communications
Decency Act provided a broad shield of immunity to online companies that
re-publish content from elsewhere. TripAdvisor is protected under section 230
of the act when reviewers say negative things about hotels and establishments,
according to Krishnamurthy.
He believes the “badge” system is a good way of hedging
against some of the risk of being held liable for injuries to travelers or to
the hotels and restaurants that get bashed by bad reviews.
“Once you start playing with the content, it becomes
trickier,” said Krishnamurthy, also of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet
& Society at Harvard University. “The more you go down the road of becoming
an e-commerce site with reviews, the protections start to look shakier.
“There are lots of unanswered questions here,” he said.
“We’re just at the beginning of seeing these kinds of suits emerge.”
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