TripAdvisor removed rape and injury warnings at Mexico resorts, tourists say | Hacker News Reader

TripAdvisor removed rape and injury warnings at Mexico resorts, tourists say

usatoday.com

156 pointsilamont33 comments

This is horrifying behavior. I'm certainly not going to use TripAdvisor again.

The most depressing part of this story is the sheer number of comments alleging sexual abuse TripAdvisor deleted. I was expecting this article to slim with about two to three allegations. The fact that USA Today could find so many people to corroborate this sort of behavior shows that TripAdvisor is making a deliberate choice to sexually and physically endanger their customers.

If Google penalized or delisted TripAdvisor, they would go out of business.

Is there any public data on how much of TripAdvisor's revenue comes from Google organic traffic or paid search traffic from AdWords? I'm guessing a considerable amount, but I try not to make assumptions about these things, particularly for large brands that likely get a significant amount of referral and direct traffic at this point in their maturity.

About zero revenues I'd say.

Travel companies pay Google for the ads. It's not unusual that the referral costs as much as the margin earned from the customer. Thus the sale can have a zero or even negative value for the travel company, it will only make money from that customer if he comes back later.

Your assumption was misplaced. The good question should be how much money does Google make from TripAdvisor? The answer is that they will lose a lot if they stop referring them.

If they are expecting to make a loss on the initial transaction, but make it up from LTV, I would be absolutely shocked as a marketer if they were not baking that into the equation when determining whether a given channel was profitable for them.

Of course they do check for profitability. There are quite a few interesting stories about that actually.

For instance, if a channel consumes the vast majority of the margin, that's still a valid channel. The advertiser could depend more on you than you depend on him.

Would be very hard for them to do that without inviting serious antitrust scrutiny.

How, though? It doesn’t seem like they compete with TripAdvisor. Their “Google Reviews” product isn’t in the same class at all.

Google has the initial search traffic for hotels/planes/cars. They could capture most of it with the commissions instead of directing to the well known comparative sites.

It's a very hot topic between Google and the travel groups.

Google Trips seems pretty close to me: https://get.google.com/trips/

And their standard search/mapping product returns lists of hotels/attractions on a map with star ratings, unique and syndicated reviews, photos, opening times and availability & price with booking link.

I don't know the details of the story, but couldn't it be just a glitch in their automatic filtering system? Happened to all of us at some point, you try to fix one thing, but accidentally screw up something else in the process.

In this case, the filtering happened by TripAdvisor staff and "trusted community members" with mod power.

But the article also mentions "hundred of filters". I imagine that the filters flag comments and then the 300 staff TripAdvisor has to ensure the reviews are legit manually review them. It's possible some sort of automatic filtering glitch has occurred, but this has been an issue since at least 2010. The company is very much still responsible.

TripAdvisor is probably paid money to promote businesses. I suspect that these warnings were automatically deleted by their servers and that TripAdvisor employees did not make a deliberate decision to endanger people. Still, this is terrible

The problem is that people want everything for free. No one wants to pay for the news. No one wants to pay for reviews. Lots of people download stuff for free. Well, if you are not paying for it, you are not the consumer. You are the one being consumed. Maybe some savvy entrepreneurs can build a business model off of providing genuine reviews

Edit: Maybe some clever person could create a decentralized, distributed review system, like bitcoin, but for online reviews

It doesn't matter who's paying or not. If you lead people to believe it's an egalitarian review site - and burying caveats in some 20,000 word ToS contract doesn't count - then stealth-editing out bad information is deceptive, and deception is a form of fraud.

The problem is not that people want everything for free. People were perfectly happy buying tourist guidebooks when they went somewhere and choosing accommodations or activities based on collected information from backpackers, tour guides etc. As in many other contexts, companies like TripAdvisor blew a hole in that market by offering what appeared to be free, instant, and open-source trip-sharing information, while quietly monetizing it in the background and using their monetization strategy to wreck any genuine open source competition. It's a business model we've seen deployed over and over again, and it's turning out to be a rather shitty one.

TripAdvisor receives a commission on the bookings.

TA has a glaring conflict of interest here. They can't represent the interests of both the travel businesses and the travelers at the same time: the commission will win every time.

Also, hotels have an interest in putting bad reviews and closing their competitors.

But wouldn't an effective bad review be a seemingly real testimony that you were raped at their establishment?

Until they drive away their customers with their bad reputation.

Every sales operation has the same dilemma -- serve customers or fleece them?

Same problem with Yelp monetization.

Exactly. Yelp has become little more than a protection racket for restaurants. "Nice little bistro you got here. Be a shame if it got low Yelp reviews. Pay us $$$ and we'll make sure that doesn't happen."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2dkJctUDIs

The rule is to err on the PC side of things - works for Europe.

There is a difference between alleging poor service or quality of accommodation, and, alleging a criminal act committed on the premises or by hotel staff. Trip Adviser likely must take down these posts because they allege criminal acts that in many cases are not proven in a court and therefore, Trip Adviser can be sued for libel by the hotel. If the crime is reported and charges are subsequently proven and the case is a matter of public record, then I'd say Trip Adviser is obligated to report that fact in some way. But that can take a long time, and I'd guess some guests don't report the crime to the local police at all.

It's a terrible situation not just that someone is victimized, but that they cannot warn others and spare them. What is the solution? How can victims ensure that future guests are warned?

  allege criminal acts that in many cases are not proven in a court

... which the media does all the time, often even before/without formal criminal charges being filed.

I think they would be justified in removing such reviews with allegations uncorroborated by supporting police reports. But if there is an open criminal complaint or indictment, review removals about such a case looks improper.

The story where someone spent a week getting their crime reported only to have the local police chief who was trying to help them murdered within weeks takes the cake. And the hotel refuses to help.

This is a horrible situation and TA probably deserves a class-action lawsuit. That said, Mexico has become a dumpster fire and the old days of "just stay in the tourist areas and you'll be safe" are long over. I'd sooner vacation in North Korea than Mexico.

I think most of Mexico is ok, however I speak a bit of Spanish and keep a low profile (not flashing wealth, not showing off my new smartphone).

Mexico is inexpensive and the weather is nice. I don't know what you mean by "dumpster fire". You gotta steer clear of the hot spots (such as Juarez) and just not get involved. Most people are super nice.

I used to go to Juarez regularly before it became a war zone. Then the common wisdom became "stay in the touristy areas." But over the past ten years, there have been several well-covered attacks in tourist towns on both coasts. I'm not saying you can't still have a good time, but there are just no low-risk places in Mexico any more, and the cops are not likely to be of much help unless your interests align with those of the drug cartels.

> That said, Mexico has become a dumpster fire and the old days of "just stay in the tourist areas and you'll be safe" are long over.

I enjoyed my time in Mexico earlier this year. Mexico City was wonderful, everywhere I went in the downtown core felt safe, no different than Chicago or NYC. There were wonderful plazas, street musicians playing, and great food everywhere. Granted the cops every other block helped add to the feeling of safety.

Parts of other cities felt sketchy, but then again parts of every city feel sketchy. (With a few exceptions, I've walked around Edinburgh randomly and everyplace I went was wonderful.)

The article has several spots where TripAdvisor is said to have deleted/not published a comment because they ruled it, "hearsay".

I would like someone to comment on

a) Who says TripAdvisor can tar a post with that brush anyway?

b) Does this word mean what they think it means?

Let's say, I went to a restaurant. I found huge nails in my salad. I talked to the maitre'd and he says, "there are no nails in this salad"

It seems to me that the above account, according to how TripAdvisor seems to behave, would be labeled hearsay and rejected as a whole, because I attribute words to the maitre'd, who of course is not me.

To me the account should be regarded as a first person account.

Also to me, regardless of whether it meets the technical definition of hearsay, it is valuable if someone says, "My wife found nails in her salad." or "My wife said she found nails in her salad." If I wrote, "My wife overheard a customer telling the maitre'd that there were nails in his salad" would be over the line but if that was only an embellishment of a post you'd want to include it.

From the article:

'The company isn’t the same as a travel agency with experts personally advising and selling trips, he said. Travel agents have a legal duty to disclose information about travel destinations or resorts when they know about specific risks. If they don’t and travelers get injured, the travel agent can be held liable for “failure to warn.”'

So one of TripAdvisor's competitive value-adds for advertisers is its ability to shield them from accountability for the horrific crimes occurring at their resorts.

To me is sounds like somebody wants to put out the competition.

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