Since its founding in 2000, TripAdvisor has become the largest travel site in the world, with more than 260 million unique monthly visitors. This is not however a story of TripAdvisor's success, but of the hoteliers it has had to step on to get there. Out of the 260 million users per month, not all are inclined to leave positive feedback. Of course, each user has the right to leave an honest opinion to warn other travelers about a bad experience and guide others to the best holiday possible, as is intended by the site. However, how is the community to discern between the subjective or the objective, honest or faulty, opinion or libel? Reviews you can trust? The truth is that TripAdvisor has a lot of weight on travelers' decisions in an increasingly digitized world, so poor reviews lead to poor RevPAR. In capitalistic terms, it is only fair that good services are to be fiscally rewarded and poor services to be either forced to improve or forced out of the market, but on what authority? In many hoteliers' perspectives on TripAdvisor, the judgments are simply unfair. Such was the case in 2011 when 12 hoteliers (both British and American) were preparing to go up against the internet behemoth. The hoteliers were moved to act by TripAdvisor's negative email campaigns, such as one campaign with the subject: "Don't go there. Hotel Horror Stories!" The email contained links to hotels with poor reviews on the site. However, reviews were not necessarily unanimous. In fact, some of these institutions had a majority of positive reviews. Faced with unverified reviews that were harming their revenues, the hoteliers looked for solace in the law, snowballing into a class action civil Internet defamation lawsuit. The agency that led this action, now the principle advocate for such disgruntled hoteliers, was the UK-based KwikChex, online reputation manager. The action revolved around three main demands: 1) Removal of unverified allegations, 2) Compensation for companies targeted by TripAdvisor's negative marketing, and 3) Correcting rankings which contained incorrect reviews. Hoteliers demanded these rectifications noting that 1) TripAdvisor is responsible for misrepresenting of these businesses, and secondly, TripAdvisor's "trusted community member review" pop-ups actually show TripAdvisor's endorsement of negative reviews. Within a year, KwikChex was approached by nearly 2,000 hoteliers seeking to right accused defamation. Meanwhile, across the pond... TripAdvisor has most recently been in the headlines due to a case in the United States that came to a close at the end of August - with a ruling against the hotelier. In 2011, Tennessee's Grand Resort Hotel & Convention Center was named number one in TripAdvisor's "Dirtiest Hotels in the US" list. Offended owner/operator Kenneth Seaton therefore sued TripAdvisor for $10 million for defamation in October 2011. The case was thrown out of the court, but later tried on appeal, where Seaton lost his case against the user comment site. The appeals court had found that TripAdvisor was not at fault or defamation, as the offending comments were opinion rather than fact. This particular case highlights the differences between the United States and United Kingdom when it comes to online defamation versus freedom of speech. "Online, Congress has given a special, very broad safe harbor to folks like TripAdvisor, and that has repeatedly been upheld by the courts", explains Professor Jack Lerner o the University of Southern California Law School. "Otherwise it would be too risky to be the service provider." The Tennessee hotel was shut down in late 2012 and sold to a holding company. It is now being converted into a 400-room establishment with meetings space.
