Tripadvisor has recently added AI-generated summaries of user reviews to its hotel listings, but a major British consumer group says the AI summaries don’t accurately reflect the reviews and lean toward a rosy view, ignoring serious complaints.
The group, Which?, has been testing the summaries in comparison to the reviews themselves and says that negative comments aren’t making it into the summaries.
One example it offered was for the five-star, all-inclusive Riu Palace Santa Maria in Cape Verde. The summary, in generated sentences, cited “popular with many travelers,” “diverse restaurants” that earn “rave reviews,” and cleanliness was listed as “spotless.” But when Which? dove into the reviews themselves, they found 102 mentions of food poisoning, including 14 with serious illness. One review shared a photo of flies and birds in the buffet food.
A hotel in Turkey was noted in the summary for “friendly” service with “lapses noticed by a few,” while numbers of guests had posted about sexual harassment from hotel staff and inappropriate jokes and gestures. A Dominican Republic hotel where guests complained about lack of running water was noted in the summary as having “abundant amenities,” despite “maintenance issues.”
Tripadvisor pushed back, saying it “fundamentally disagrees” with Which?’s investigation and said the AI summaries were designed for “integrity and transparency.” And then they said, basically, ‘pay no attention to the summaries’—“We believe our community understands that AI technology is still developing and has the common sense to check any AI advice against Tripadvisor’s billion-plus reviews and contributions.”
