Fake reviews can ruin tourism businesses. Italy thinks it has the answer

Sophie Dickinson

Rome: You’re in a new city for the weekend and need somewhere to eat at short notice. You search for the best places for dinner, alight upon a promising-looking restaurant, and then stop – the reviews are mixed. There’s talk of slow service and impolite staff. And while you can’t verify that the reviews are truthful, it’s enough to dissuade you from booking.

Unfortunately, there is a chance that some of those reviews are fake.

The problem of fake reviews has been around for as long as sites like Tripadvisor have existed. Yet with the rise of review “farms” and AI technology, the battle to stem the tide has become harder than ever.

Now Italy is attempting to fight back by requiring would-be reviewers to provide identification, along with proof that they visited the hotel, restaurant or attraction in question. Reviews would need to be “detailed and relevant” and must be posted within two weeks of visiting, while paid-for reviews would be entirely banned. Businesses will be able to seek the removal of reviews that are more than two years old if they are no longer “relevant”.

It is perhaps unsurprising that Italy, a country where tourism comprises around 13 per cent of GDP, is taking this seriously. According to Tripadvisor, 81 per cent of people “frequently or always read reviews before booking a hotel”. The Competition and Markets Authority estimates that reviews could influence £23 billion of UK customer spending each year. For hotels, restaurants and holiday companies, the impact of a bad review can be catastrophic. It’s for that reason that rival businesses might leave negative feedback for a competitor. Or they might do the inverse, employing “reputation management” services, or review farms, to inflate their own rating.

Located in countries including India, Russia, Nepal, Indonesia and the Philippines, review farms are groups of low-paid workers hired to inflate artificially a business’s rating or leave false reviews. But more informal operations exist globally. Rajvardha Oak, who wrote his PhD on incentivised review services, found that “agents” in the United States, recruited over Instagram, could earn $4 or $5 (£3.20-4) for each fake review they posted to Amazon. The motivation is obvious, with a 2023 Which? investigation discovering that products with fake reviews were 135 per cent more in demand than those without.

There are measures in place to prevent them – some 1.3 million fake reviews were removed by Tripadvisor in 2023. A coalition of review sites including Expedia, Tripadvisor and Booking.com was formed the same year to share information across platforms. But fake reviews prevail.

Kevin Wendle, the owner of Hotel Esencia in Tulum, Mexico, says dealing with online reviews has caused lost sleep. “When I first bought the hotel, you would get someone who had a legitimate complaint and you would really worry about losing customers as a result of a single bad review,” he says. Research has shown that one negative review is considerably more powerful than multiple positive ones.

While almost all tourists refer to a review site before making a booking, most are not contributors. Brigitte Stangl, a senior lecturer at the University of Surrey, says that this can skew a consumer’s impression further.

“There are still only a very small number of consumers who write something,” she says. “People only tend to report a very bad experience or very good experience. They don’t make the effort if they have an average experience, because it’s basically not worth telling anyone about it.” This means that fake reviews can be difficult to spot. As most legitimate reviews are highly emotive, a spate of especially positive or negative feedback may not raise any flags.

Kevin Wendle, a hotelier, says that part of the incentive for fake reviews is that businesses are sometimes rewarded by ratings sites’ algorithms for having a large number of reviews. This means that the volume can be as significant as the ratings themselves. “The larger hotels, who are actively recruiting reviewers, tend to rank higher than a smaller hotel, because the smaller one will likely not engage with that,” he says. Some hotels also pay ratings sites such as Tripadvisor to appear in lists of “featured” properties – which are not based solely on customer reviews.

Compounding the problem is the rise of artificial intelligence, which has made the definition of a “fake” review even more elastic. Generative AI systems such as ChatGPT allow review farms, or unscrupulous business owners, to create false reviews in a matter of seconds. But it also means that legitimate reviews, written by real customers using AI, could be accidentally flagged as false.

For Wendle, reviews written with AI are, at least for now, easy to detect. “We got a funny one – a five-star one, luckily. The AI pulled a lot of content from our website. A lot of the description, down to the sentences, were copied verbatim.”

“It’s a compliment that they took the effort to do it, AI or not,” he says. “It’s helping people write, and I have nothing against that.”

As the technology advances, so too do fake review detection systems. One such example is Fakespot, a browser plugin that uses AI to flag false ratings to shoppers. The company boasts around one million users, but whether the technology is strong enough to intercept all reviews is unclear.

Stangl believes that it is an arms race. “It’s very tricky and difficult,” she says. “The algorithms to hunt down fake reviews are getting better, but so is the AI people use to create those reviews. So detecting it is really tough, and there also need to be manual checks.”

Under Italy’s proposals, the detection and deletion of reviews will fall ultimately to a (human) ombudsman. How this official will verify the information is unclear. Proving an individual stayed at a hotel, for example, will help prevent some fakes (at least the ones proliferated by review farms). Demonstrating that a reviewer had a positive time, contrary to a negative review, will be much more difficult.

Speaking to The Telegraph, a spokesman for Tripadvisor was sceptical about its impact. “Italy’s proposed legislation to fight fake reviews is well intended, but it takes a blunt and outdated approach,” they said, noting that the change would depress review volume.

Ryan Broderick, an internet commentator and analyst, agrees. “I think the immediate result would be a total drop-off in people leaving reviews,” he says. “It’s an admirable law to try to pass, but I think any law requiring internet users to submit an ID to post online is, at best, a massive security risk and, at worst, authoritarian and counter to the entire ethos of the internet.”

The Italian model, then, is perhaps not the solution. For Wendle, a more old-fashioned approach might be the preferable option. “I tend to book based on word of mouth from friends wherever I can, or places that are recommended by Michelin, or hotel lists,” he says. “I believe that cream will rise to the top, regardless of what online reviews say.”