Personally, I don’t hate TripAdvisor because of the bully-boy tactics or rapaciousness with which it is associated. I don’t see how it could help a newcomer get a feel for the city The Manchester top 10 proves it’s not fit for purpose. “Only a very small proportion felt that it was ‘not very likely’ or ‘not at all likely’ that the reviews were written by genuine customers,” the report concluded. A 2015 government-backed Competitions & Markets Authority investigation found that UK consumers spend more than £23bn a year after reading online reviews. 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. 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. 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.ĭespite 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.
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Never before or since have I eaten in a restaurant where our hosts fished the meal from a vast chest freezer in full view.
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. I t was in a small seaside town in Croatia that my dislike of TripAdvisor petrified into loathing.