More strife for TripAdvisor

TripAdvisor has come under fire from a hotel in Singapore which it named as the dirtiest in town.

In its 2011 list of Asia’s Top 10 dirtiest hotels, Goldkist Beach Resort at East Coast Park ranked first, up from third last year.

The New Paper in Singapore reported that Goldkist’s manager, Vikas Gupta, last year wrote a letter to TripAdvisor and Expedia Singapore inviting the online hotel review site to inspect the resort and subsequently remove it from the list of dirtiest hotels.

He said, “The negative reviews on TripAdvisor continued to give us problems. Thereafter, we decided not to continue loading room inventories into Expedia.

“Not long after, our guests started calling and e-mailing us to say their positive reviews on Goldkist were not appearing on TripAdvisor. Also, when I replied to some of the negative reviews on TripAdvisor, they were not published.”

He added that Goldkist had also received an e-mail from TripAdvisor asking the resort to “sign up for an annual subscription” and join its business listings.

“On many online forums, hoteliers had said that once they paid the subscription, TripAdvisor would remove the negative reviews about them,” Gupta said.

“Perhaps if we subscribed, we wouldn’t be listed as the dirtiest hotel in Asia.”

According to The New Paper, a spokesman for TripAdvisor rubbished Gupta’s claims, saying its hotel ratings are not tied to business listings.

When a hotel subscribes to TripAdvisor’s business listings, it can add its contact details (phone number, e-mail address and website address) on all TripAdvisor website domains.

Annual and monthly subscriptions are capped at a fixed amount and are tiered according to the number of rooms and the hotel’s location. Depending on hotel size, annual subscriptions range from US$360 to US$10,500.

More than 1,000 hoteliers around the world have threatened to take legal action against TripAdvisor for damaging their businesses with allegedly malicious and unfounded reviews.

The lawsuits are being pursued by KwikChex, a British reputation management company, on behalf of its clients.

Chris Emmins, a founder of KwikChex, said it estimates there are at least 27,000 legally defamatory comments on TripAdvisor, “allegations that are false and should, if necessary, be tested in court”.

The New Paper submitted a positive review about Goldkist to TripAdvisor .

Two days later, the newspaper submitted a negative review about Goldkist, using a different username.

The next day, the negative review was published on the website without any verification e-mail from TripAdvisor.

As for the positive review, TripAdvisor sent two e-mails asking for verification, asking: “Is this your review? Action required.”

The recipient had to click on a link provided in the e-mail to verify that he or she wrote the review. The newspaper did so.

When TravelMole last checked TripAdvisor there were no recent positive reviews for Goldkist Resort, but a lot of negative reviews, including one which labelled the hotel as “a national disgrace”.