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FOREWORD

Two years ago, we published our inaugural Review Transparency Report highlighting in detail the volume of reviews submitted to Tripadvisor over a twelve-month period, how we assessed those reviews to ensure they met our community standards, and how we prevented those who attempted to post fake reviews from infiltrating our platform.

The report was an industry first - no other global review platform had produced such a level of detail into their moderation and fraud detection practices. At the time, we were seeing a lot of misinformation about how, or even if, a platform like ours could effectively ensure that the user-generated content we hosted was accurate and reliable. Our hope was that, in pulling back the curtains to reveal our data in all its detail, we would kickstart a trend towards greater transparency that other review platforms would adopt.

Over the last two years, we were excited to see exactly that trend play out - other platforms have begun to follow our lead in reporting their review moderation numbers, and consumers and businesses have benefited from greater access to information about how the platforms they use operate behind the scenes. We believe this level of transparency is vital to maintain trust among the millions of travelers who rely on our community’s guidance, and among the millions of businesses - many of which are small and independently owned - for whom Tripadvisor is their shop window to the world.

What we could not predict in 2019, however, was just how much the wider industry in which we operate - travel and hospitality - would be changed in just two years.

Of course, much has already been written about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on how and where we can travel. However, little attention, to date at least, has been paid to the impact of the pandemic on the guidance travelers rely on to plan the trips they care most about - guidance from travelers who have been there before. Because, with all of the uncertainty travelers have faced over the last 20 months, the ability to call upon recent experiences and guidance from people all over the world has never been more valuable. It is at the heart of Tripadvisor’s mission to help everyone become a better traveler, and it is why we are the world’s largest travel guidance platform.

For the first time, this report sheds light on these important trends. By analyzing a year’s worth of review data on Tripadvisor, covering the full calendar year in 2020, we reveal just how much review contributions have been altered by the pandemic, as well as the actions we have taken as a platform to adjust to this new reality.

Much has certainly changed in travel in the last year, but what hasn’t is the importance of finding travel guidance you can trust. That trust, as ever, is earned not given. At Tripadvisor, we will never take that for granted. We remain steadfast in our commitment to transparency and taking responsible actions as a platform in service of the global travel community and our partners. We hope this report demonstrates why your trust in us is well-placed.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

In 2020, the world faced one of its greatest challenges yet — and the travel industry faced unprecedented change. The COVID-19 pandemic significantly impacted almost every aspect of travel, including how travelers use Tripadvisor to plan their trips.

The 2021 Tripadvisor Review Transparency Report reflects on this transformation, analyzing a full year’s worth of traveler contributions — over 26 million reviews in total — to provide a deeper look at how review trends shifted during this unparalleled time, and examine the measures Tripadvisor takes to ensure the travel guidance on our platform remains accurate, useful, and relevant.

KEY FINDINGS

• Travelers submitted over 26,000,000 reviews to the site in 2020.
• The average rating submitted by reviewers for businesses and locations listed on Tripadvisor was 4.30 out of 5.0, up from 4.22 out of 5.0 in 2018.
• In 2020, more than two million review submissions were rejected or removed by Tripadvisor, either by our advanced review analysis system or manually by a member of our content moderation team — representing just 8.6% of all submissions that year. There are a number of reasons why Tripadvisor rejects or removes reviews, ranging from community standards violations (such as the use of profanity) to fake review activity.

Of the reviews that fell outside of our guidelines and standards, 33.9% were removed or rejected by our review analysis system before being posted, without the need for human intervention. The rest were removed following intervention by our team of content moderators.

Looking specifically at fake reviews, only a very small fraction of all review submissions — 3.6% — were determined to be fraudulent, totaling 943,205 reviews. Of those, Tripadvisor prevented 67.1% of all fake review submissions from ever making it onto the platform.

Travelers or businesses flagged only 1.0% of reviews for potentially violating Tripadvisor guidelines. 85% of those community reports were assessed by our moderation team within four hours of being submitted, and 43% of all reviews reported by the community were removed following that assessment.

CONTENT &
REVIEW SUBMISSIONS

Tripadvisor is the world’s largest travel guidance platform, and user-generated content is at the core of our mission. We believe that when individuals share their first-hand experiences of travel, it helps everyone become a better traveler.

In 2020, Tripadvisor received approximately 59 million reviews and opinions from its members around the world. This includes a number of different forms of user-generated content (UGC), such as reviews, management responses (which are submitted by business representatives in reply to reviews), and forum posts. Of these, Tripadvisor received more than 26 million review submissions from its global traveler community in 2020, each averaging 388 characters in length. 

Travelers submitted reviews from every continent: 54.1% of submissions were for customer experiences that took place in Europe, 23.5% in North America, 13.7% for Asia and the South Pacific, 4.7% in Central and South America, and 3.9% in Africa, Antarctica, and the Middle East.

Travelers review every part of their journey. In 2020, travelers submitted over 8 million reviews for hotels, over 12 million reviews for restaurants, and over 4 million reviews for experiences, attractions, and activities.

SAFETY FIRST

^{How Covid-19 Changed Review Moderation at Tripadvisor}

The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically impacted the travel industry — including how travelers used Tripadvisor. With stay-at-home orders enforced in many countries, borders closed, and a global commitment to “stop the spread” - travel came to a standstill.

This meant that overall, travelers submitted fewer reviews on the platform in 2020 compared to previous years, reflective of the fact that the travel community had fewer near-term travel experiences to share. You can see this most clearly by looking at the breakdown of review submissions by month.

Typically, the volume of reviews spike in July and August during the Northern Hemisphere’s summer travel season. For example, in 2018, travelers left over 8 million reviews in August alone. By comparison, that number was cut by half in 2020, to approximately 4 million reviews — still lower than review submission totals from January 2020, in the period immediately prior to the pandemic.

Navigating the COVID-19 pandemic added another level of complexity both for travelers, when it came to planning a safe trip, and for hospitality business owners, who had to adapt to new regulations and/or introduce special measures to protect the safety of guests and customers.

As a travel guidance platform, it is important that the information available on Tripadvisor reflects this new reality. For this reason, we made the decision to update our community standards and moderation processes to ensure travelers had access to the information they needed and businesses were being treated fairly during this unprecedented time. As the situation continues to evolve, we’ve made a number of adjustments to our review moderation practices since the onset of the pandemic:

1. We remove any content that encourages people to ignore government guidelines or restrictions, or discourages people from seeking medical assistance, testing, or promotes misinformation.
2. We remove any review criticizing an individual business for closing in response to COVID-19 lockdown measures or for the safety of their customers and staff.
3. We continue to ban racially insensitive content, including any reviews that refer to the COVID-19 virus as the ‘Chinese virus’ or ‘Wuhan virus’. Reviews naming the virus must use official World Health Organization terminology (such as Coronavirus, or COVID-19).

As a result of these changes, our team manually moderated an additional 257,022 reviews - all of these submissions identified as being related to COVID travel issues. Of those, 17.95% or 46,145 reviews were removed by moderators for violating our posting guidelines. We’ll talk more about content moderation later in this report.

REVIEW RATINGS

When submitting a review on Tripadvisor, travelers submit bubble ratings on a scale from 5 (Excellent) to 1 (Terrible). 

Despite the fact that travelers left fewer reviews overall in the past year, the reviews they did leave indicated a higher level of satisfaction - the average review rating in 2020 was 4.30 out of 5.0, up from 4.22 out of 5.0 in 2018 (when we last reported average rating data). Even with all of the challenges the hospitality industry faces today, the majority of travelers submitting reviews on Tripadvisor do so to share their positive experiences and reward businesses that make their experience special.

In fact, one-bubble ratings represent only 7.2% of reviews submitted in 2020. More than eight out of ten reviews (82%) received 4 or 5 bubbles and nearly two-thirds of all reviews received 5 bubbles (65.8%).

HOW THE CONTENT MODERATION PROCESS WORKS

People come to Tripadvisor for guidance from those who traveled before them, and they rely on that guidance to make decisions about where to stay, what to do and where to eat. So it is incredibly important that the content we host provides the insight people are looking for. That is why we insist that every piece of content travelers submit to the Tripadvisor platform - whether it is a photo, comment, Management Response, or review - must comply with our community standards.

Specifically, reviews submitted to Tripadvisor must be:

• Recent: The experience must have occurred within the past 12 months.
• Unbiased: Individuals or entities affiliated with a property are not allowed to post reviews of their business or competing establishments. 
• Non-Commercial: Reviews cannot contain links or promotional content or advertisements.
• Relevant to travel experiences: Personal opinions and content irrelevant to the experience are not allowed, including posts about politics, race, ethics, religion, and social issues. 
• First-hand: Reviews must be from the point of view of the traveler authoring them. Rumors, second-hand information, quotations for other sources, or links to news articles will not be published.
• Respectful: Tripadvisor will not host any content that promotes intolerance for, contains offensive stereotypes of, or incites hatred or bias towards people based on their ethnic or social origin, race, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, religious/spiritual beliefs, socioeconomic class, physical or mental ability, immigration status or nationality.

Pre-posting moderation occurs after a traveler submits a review but before it goes live on the site or app. This process algorithmically screens reviews, automatically eliminating any content that violates Tripadvisor’s guidelines, contains misinformation, or spam.

One hundred percent of the traveler reviews submitted to Tripadvisor are screened through this proprietary review analysis system. After screening, the system either posts the review, rejects the review, or sends the review for further assessment to our team of human moderators.

If the system detects any reason to suspect a review may not be genuine, our team undertakes a deeper assessment before posting. 

Tripadvisor has a team of moderators that work around the clock in 28 languages to assess the nuanced factors the automated system may not be able to act on conclusively, including gathering additional information to reach an informed decision. For example, our team may reach out to a reviewer to verify certain information about their review. In 2020, 3.1% of review submissions were posted after a human assessment at the pre-posting stage (i.e. that assessment had been triggered by our review analysis system), while 2% of review submissions were rejected after human assessment occurred at the pre-posting stage.

In total, using this layered approach to moderation, Tripadvisor rejected 1.3 million reviews before they ever made it to the site in 2020, or 5.1% of all reviews submitted to the platform - up from 3.2% of submissions in 2018.

INVESTIGATING CONTESTED REVIEWS

Our goal is always to catch suspicious content before it’s ever posted on the site — but no system is perfect. That’s why, in addition to assessing reviews flagged by our review analysis system pre-posting, our team of moderators also investigates concerns raised about reviews already posted to the site in a process we call after-posting moderation.

Reviews removed as a result of after-posting moderation account for a small minority of reviews submitted to the site. In 2020, less than 4% of all review submissions were manually removed by our moderators after having been live on the platform.

Often, after-posting moderation occurs in response to a report from the Tripadvisor community, which plays an important part in ensuring the integrity of reviews appearing on our platform. 1% of all reviews posted in 2020 were reported by our community; we refer to these as contested reviews.

Whenever a review is contested, it automatically prompts an assessment by our moderation team, who determine whether or not the review should be removed. After such an assessment, our team removed 43.1% of all contested reviews in 2020. The remainder (56.9%) complied with our community standards and remained posted.

We want to respond to reports from our community quickly — and we do. Our team responded to 85% of reports in under 4 hours. Across the thousands of contested reviews manually assessed every day, the average response time in 2020 was 5.1 hours. Less than 2% of reports took more than 24 hours.

In 2020, 99.7% of the contested review reports we received from businesses listed on Tripadvisor were responded to in less than 12 hours. 85.3% of the reports submitted by the wider traveler community (non-business owners) were responded to in less than 12 hours.

Overall, between pre-posting and after-posting moderation, more than 2 million reviews submissions in 2020 were rejected or removed. That represents 8.6% of all review submissions that year - up from 4.8% in 2018.  In the next section, we will outline why reviews get removed or rejected and the reasons behind the increase in rejected content in 2020 versus 2018.

WHY REVIEWS GET REJECTED OR REMOVED

Generally, if a review gets rejected or removed it is for one of three reasons: either the review violates our community standard violations, or it is a fake or fraudulent submission intended to deceive travelers, or there is some other administrative reason for its removal (such as the business closing, or the reviewer opting to delete the submission themselves). 

When a review violates our community standards in some way, such as through the use of profanity or irrelevant content, it goes through the moderation process described in Section Two. Of the reviews we removed or rejected, 48.3% were because of violations like these, and 12% were removed for administrative reasons. The remaining 39.7% were removed because the submission did not describe a genuine or unbiased experience - we call this category fake reviews. A number of world events contributed to this category in 2020 and as such, led to the increase in rejected submissions referenced at the end of Section Two of this report.

COMBATING MISINFORMATION & FAKE REVIEWS

• Biased positive reviews: When someone connected with a business — such as an owner, employee, or even a friend or relative — attempts to post a positive review of that business, or when a business offers its customers incentives, such as a free meal or a discount, to post positive reviews. This is also sometimes referred to as review boosting.
• Biased negative reviews: When someone submits a deliberately malicious review about a property in an effort to unfairly lower its ranking position or improperly discredit the property in some way. This is also referred to as review vandalism.
• Paid reviews: When a business, either knowingly or unwittingly, employs the services of an individual or a firm to boost its ranking position on Tripadvisor with positive reviews.

While they represent a very small percentage (3.6%) of the millions of reviews submitted to Tripadvisor in 2020, our team spends countless hours combating and catching those who attempt to submit fake reviews. Combating fake reviews is especially important for Tripadvisor and the travel industry because Tripadvisor believes travelers — who are often traveling to parts unknown — should have access to the most relevant, useful, and accurate information available as they plan their journey.

As a result of the layered approach to pre-posting moderation described in Section Two, the majority of fake reviews submitted to Tripadvisor in 2020 (67.1%) never made it live onto the platform. 

To catch fraudulent reviews, Tripadvisor employs sophisticated review fraud detection technology — paired with our expert investigative team — that uses best practice techniques from the banking and credit card industry to map hundreds of discrete pieces of online information that help to detect the review’s origin and circumstance, as well as its potential connection to other reviews or reviewer accounts. This includes establishing patterns of suspicious behavior from paid review operations. 

In fact, as a result of the team’s efforts, Tripadvisor has put a stop to the activity of over 120 different paid review companies around the world in recent years.

WHERE DO PAID REVIEWS COME FROM?

Paid reviews originate from everywhere in the world and are sometimes tied to major events, like the spike in fake reviews we spotted during the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia, where our team shut down 18 different paid review companies attempting to capitalize on the huge increase in visitors that attend and participate in the event. 

In 2020, we removed paid reviews from 131 different countries, though paid review submissions were more prevalent in some countries than others. For example, we identified a spike in paid reviews originating from India. Note that this does not mean properties in India were necessarily more prone to paid reviews than properties in other countries - paid reviewers from India, or indeed from any country in the world, will typically attempt to ‘sell’ review submissions to hospitality businesses all over the world, not just those in their home country.

Our investigators work hard to stay ahead of shifting behaviors of paid reviewers so that however they attempt to infiltrate our platform, we’re ready for them. We take fake reviews extremely seriously — because we want to support the vast majority of travelers and business owners that do play by the rules.

In 2020, we penalized 34,605 properties for fraudulent activity and banned 20,299 members for failing to abide by our community standards. We also identified 65 new paid review sites in 2020 and blocked paid review submissions from a total of 372 different paid review sites.

PREVENTING REVIEW BOMBING

High-profile incidents that occur at properties, such as political activity or protests, “viral” social media activity, or news media attention often result in an influx of review submissions that do not describe a first-hand customer experience — and as such do not comply with our community standards. We call this phenomena review bombing.

While our automatic system catches most instances of review bombing, the sheer volume of reviews in such cases requires additional action. In these situations, we institute a lockdown notice.

A lockdown notice prevents anyone from submitting a review for that business for a set period of time. In 2020, we placed lockdown notices on 323 properties listed on Tripadvisor, preventing 10,598 non-first hand review submissions from reaching the site during that time. 

Lockdown notices aren’t permanent, but they do maintain the integrity of the site, preventing submissions that detract from the first-hand customer experiences our platform is intended for.

CONCLUSION

2020 was a year unlike any other for the travel industry, and our review volumes and trends reflect that. With flights grounded and borders closed, it is no surprise that review volumes dropped. Yet, as soon as customers were able to travel and dine out again, average ratings on Tripadvisor increased, suggesting travelers were excited to reward their favorite hospitality businesses after a year of enormous challenges facing the industry.

We also learned that even during a pandemic, there are those that would try to game the system. While our overall review contributions dropped in line with the slowdown in travel, fraudulent submissions - which of course are not predicated on a real customer experience - did not follow the same trend. Our team remained vigilant and effective at catching would-be fraudsters, and as a result the proportion of reviews we rejected or removed increased compared to pre-pandemic 2018 figures. Our investigators also identified shifting trends in where paid reviews originate from - with India overtaking Russia at the top of the list of countries from which paid reviews were submitted.

Finally, the pandemic itself influenced how our moderation processes took shape - with new community guidelines introduced to ensure reviews did not spread misinformation, and to protect from unfair commentary businesses that have been keeping customers safe.

WHAT'S NEXT

Tripadvisor remains committed to maintaining a safe, responsible and useful platform for all. In pursuit of this, and in the spirit of transparency, we are prioritizing a number of new initiatives set to launch in the coming months, including:

A new dedicated website designed to provide more information on Tripadvisor’s Trust & Safety efforts, including but not limited to:

• Expanded content and community guidelines - now with more detail than ever about what we do and do not allow to be posted on our site
• Tripadvisor Says NoMore - a first-of-its-kind program providing hospitality businesses with employee training materials aimed at preventing sexual harassment and assault in the hospitality sector

A project championing greater transparency around how and when we apply penalties to a property in order to deter fraudulent submissions in future. This includes updates to our communication process to those properties impacted by such penalties so that businesses and consumers can feel confident our penalization policies are being applied fairly, consistently and proportionately.

BETTER TOGETHER

To say that 2020 was an incredibly challenging year is an understatement. But more than ever, we’re in this together. 

Tripadvisor has a responsibility to protect the platform that we built for the benefit of everyone in the travel community — businesses and consumers alike. That responsibility is even more true after a year of travel shut-downs, border closures, and lost travel opportunities.

With this “new normal,” ensuring high-quality travel guidance remains a key priority, and one that our team takes very seriously.

Even as we proactively seek out paid review companies and fraudulent activity, we need your help. Our passionate community is a valuable partner in protecting the content on our platform, and we encourage any user with a concern about a review to report it to us for further investigation. We act on every report we receive. 

We also welcome the opportunity to work more closely with other platforms to root out paid reviewers. We know from our investigations that paid review firms rarely target a single platform - if someone is trying to infiltrate Tripadvisor with fake reviews, the chances are they are doing the same to Google, Facebook, Amazon and others. And while we have seen progress in the last two years as more and more platforms have followed our lead towards greater transparency around their review moderation practices, there is still more that can be achieved if we work together. 

Similarly, we are open to working closely with hospitality businesses, consumer rights organizations, regulators and law enforcement agencies to identify and prosecute paid review fraudsters. 

If you want to join the fight against paid reviews, please contact our team directly at paidreviews@tripadvisor.com