Tripadvisor AI summaries mask food poisoning and harassment reports, investigation reveals

AI summaries of Tripadvisor hotel reviews downplay serious complaints, investigation finds

AI-generated overview found to gloss over allegations of sexual harassment and describes hotel being sued over hygiene as 'spotless' A hotel being sued for mass food poisonings was described as "spotless" and a resort where guests complained of sexual harassment by staff was praised for "friendly" service by an AI intended to summarise millions of Tripadvisor reviews. The overviews of customer feedback downplayed serious complaints, ranging from the stench of mould to a lack of mains water, according to an investigation by the consumer campaign organisation Which? The AI-generated reviews appear on the travel website's hotel webpages to help holidaymakers decide where to book. In one case, the AI summary described the Riu Palace Santa Maria in Cape Verde as popular, with spacious rooms, "diverse restaurants" that earn "rave reviews" and spotless cleanliness. Yet customers reported being served raw chicken, shared photographs of flies and birds on the buffet and reported "dead little roasted mice by the sitting area". A guest whose whole family became ill wrote: "This place will destroy holidays." The hotel chain is being sued in the high court by hundreds of guests alleging illnesses linked to poor hygiene standards and food safety failings. The AI-generated review for the Cape Verde hotel is no longer available. Its operator, RIU Hotels & Resorts, said: "We operate with the highest standards of professionalism and service, placing hygienic-sanitary safety as our top priority." The AI praised a separate Dominican Republic hotel for its "abundant" amenities, with only a nod to "inconsistent" cleanliness and "maintenance issues". But guests reported showering with bottled water because the mains taps ran dry and that every other person in a large wedding party became sick. Meanwhile, guests of a hotel in Turkey wrote that they felt unsafe due to repeated sexual harassment from male hotel staff, including requests to connect on social media, but the AI summary described the service as "friendly" and merely said "lapses [in service] noted by a few", Which? found. Tripadvisor said it was monitoring and refining its AI tool and was "looking into the examples where reviews did not match the intended property". But it said it was "confident these features are delivering exactly what they were designed to do: help travellers quickly understand the breadth of feedback while making it easy to explore the underlying reviews in full". It said the AI-generated summaries did not replace travellers' reviews and that customers had the common sense to check any AI advice against the billion-plus reviews and contributions it has gathered. Rory Boland, the editor of Which? Travel, said: "The platform has a responsibility to revisit the accuracy of its AI summaries and AI chatbot. In the meantime, users should scroll past these summaries and look at guest reviews, particularly one-star ratings, and at reviews on other sites, to make sure their next stay is a safe one." Tripadvisor said its systems automatically suppress AI summaries when travellers warn about serious safety incidents such as death, drugging or sexual assault, "helping ensure this content is highly visible to our community". Duncan Brumby, a professor of human-computer interaction at University College London, said the case chimed with his own research into academics using AI during the peer-review process. He found AI tends to "sanitise and rub off the edges" of sharper criticisms, likely because the bulk of the training data contains so many more bland observations. "Here you have guests describing a really negative experience, but the AI has decided to tone it down," he said. "It's as if it's being polite." Other studies have found technologies designed to summarise opinions often suffer from a blind spot that means they reduce the richness of consumer feedback to shallower sentiments. This year Google removed some of its AI health summaries after a Guardian investigation found people were being put at risk of harm by false and misleading information.

AI wants to summarize it all. TripAdvisor's misleading reviews show AI will also ruin your travel plans

Spotless, friendly, and totally wrong. AI summaries are hiding the reviews that actually matter. Planning a trip is stressful enough without wondering if the glowing hotel summary you just read was written by an AI that skipped the scary parts. As it turns out, that might be exactly what's happening on TripAdvisor. According to an investigation by consumer group Which?, reported by the Guardian, TripAdvisor's AI-generated review summaries are smoothing over serious guest complaints, and in some cases, downright dangerous ones. Can you trust an AI summary of your hotel reviews? Take, for example, the Riu Palace Santa Maria in Cape Verde. The AI summary called it spotless, with diverse restaurants earning rave reviews. Real guests, on the other hand, described being served raw chicken, flies and birds near the buffet, and even dead mice by the seating area. Recommended Videos The hotel chain is currently being sued in the High Court by hundreds of guests over alleged illnesses linked to hygiene failures. You wouldn't know any of that from the AI's cheerful summary, which has since been taken down. If you thought that was bad, I am sad to inform you that it gets worse. A hotel in Turkey saw guests report repeated sexual harassment from male staff. The AI summary called the service friendly with only a few lapses. If someone booked the hotel based on the AI overview of user reviews, they would have no inkling of the horror they would face there. There are several other examples like this that the investigation found. Why does AI keep softening bad reviews? A UCL professor of human-computer interaction, Duncan Brumby, offered a simple explanation. AI models tend to sand down harsh criticism because most of their training data leans bland and polite. So when a guest writes a negative review, the AI sometimes treats it like a minor inconvenience instead. TripAdvisor says it's looking into the mismatched summaries and that its systems suppress AI overviews when reviews mention serious safety incidents. It also maintains that these summaries were never meant to replace actual reviews. Still, the takeaway is simple. Don't let AI summaries make your travel decisions for you. Scroll past it, read the one-star reviews, and check other sites too. AI summaries have time and again proven to be fraught with inconsistencies, and it's always good to do your own research, lest your vacation turns into a nightmare.

Tripadvisor AI review summaries are 'potentially life-threatening'

Tripadvisor's new AI review summaries are masking reports of food poisoning, sexual harassment and serious hygiene failures, a Which? investigation has found. When browsing Tripadvisor, holidaymakers will now find an AI summary at the top of the page for the hotel they are looking at. These summaries may look useful in giving quick and easy information about the property, but in some cases scrolling down to guest reviews tells another story, according to a recently released investigation by UK consumer champion Which?. 'Spotless' hotel with a history of food poisoning Tripadvisor's AI summary describes the five-star, all-inclusive, Riu Palace Santa Maria in Cape Verde as 'popular with many travellers', with 'spacious rooms', 'diverse restaurants' that earn 'rave reviews' and cleanliness summarised as 'spotless'. However, recent reviews on Tripadvisor paint a very different picture. Guests at the Riu Palace reported 'exceptionally poor hygiene', 'no basic cleaning or hygiene standards' and food that was 'awful, bland, unsafe and inedible'. One guest said she was served raw chicken; another shared photographs of flies and birds in the buffet food and another spotted 'dead little roasted mice by the sitting area' on her 'nightmare' holiday. One guest whose whole family fell ill wrote: 'This place will destroy holidays, and [has the] potential to take lives.' When Which? checked in March this year, there were 102 mentions of food poisoning at the Riu Palace. The resort also had 32 one- and two-star reviews posted between December 2025 and April 2026 alone, 14 of which say at least one member of the party fell seriously ill with some form of food poisoning. Many were hospitalised, some flew home early and one guest died this year. The hotel is now involved in a group legal action representing at least 412 holidaymakers who say they became ill after staying at the property, with seven deaths reported since 2023. Another of Tripadvisor's AI tools, an interactive trip planning bot called Ollie, also failed to warn holidaymakers about poor hygiene. When asked directly about the risk of contracting food poisoning at the Riu Palace, Ollie said food poisoning was 'quite unlikely', and that the resort had a 'strong reputation for high hygiene standards'. AI summaries downplay serious issues When Which? asked Tripadvisor about its AI summaries, it said it prioritises 'transparency and impartiality' and its summaries 'surface a range of both positive and negative community feedback associated with listings'. Tripadvisor also told Which? that AI chat assistant tool Ollie 'draws from a selection of reviews based on detail and recency, and matches by language and context', but it added that it is a 'product in development', and that it is now actively looking into several examples the consumer champion provided where reviews did not match. The Riu Palace wasn't the only hotel that Which? found serious reports of food poisoning missing from its Tripadvisor AI summary. Several guests who stayed at Garza Blanca resort in Cancun in the past 12 months also left reviews saying they fell ill, including a wedding party. Yet Tripadvisor's AI overview is once again glowing, describing 'immaculate cleanliness', adding that its dining options 'earn [it] positive feedback'. Another example was the Occidental Caribe in the Dominican Republic. Recent reviewers called it a 'disaster and disturbing' as recently as March 2026. Another called it the 'worst place imaginable'. One guest said her room smelled of sewage and that half of the 68-person wedding party she'd travelled with fell ill. Someone who visited in January reported that the whole hotel smelled of mould. Several mentioned the lack of access to running water - one guest resorted to showering with bottled water. In contrast, the AI review summary talks about the hotel's 'abundant' amenities, with only a vague nod to 'inconsistent' cleanliness and 'maintenance issues'. AI describes sexual harassment as 'lapses in service' There are other dangers Tripadvisor's AI summaries don't share. At Kaia Coracesium on the Antalya coast in Turkey, several reviewers who visited last summer wrote they felt unsafe due to repeated sexual harassment from male hotel staff, including inappropriate jokes and gestures, and repeated requests to connect on social media. Two different guests reported that a male member of staff followed their daughters to request their social media details. In one of these cases, the reviewer says a restaurant worker followed her up the stairs to her room. The Tripadvisor AI review summarises the service as 'friendly'. The closest it comes to referring to these serious allegations is: 'Lapses [in service] noted by a few'. AI makes reviews 'easy to digest' This suggests that the company's AI systems are capable of identifying and referencing these allegations, recognising that concerns raised by even a minority of reviewers may warrant inclusion in its summaries. However, questions remain as to why such references do not appear consistently and, when they do, why the language used appears to minimise their significance. Tripadvisor said its summaries "use large language models and natural language processing to read recent reviews, identify the most common themes and then turn those themes into short, plain-English overviews", and that its goal was to "make content from Tripadvisor's reviews and opinions as easy as possible to digest, but also to capture and highlight the broad spectrum of positive and negative opinion without favouring one sentiment or the other". It told Which? that summaries are updated on a monthly basis "and are rooted in the previous 12 months of reviews at the time of each update", and that reviews are treated equally regardless of rating, highlighting what reviewers mention most often. For comparison, Which? looked at rival platforms' approach to AI summaries for hotels. Google manages context in their AI summaries far better. Google's overview for the Riu Palace warned of 'potential for illness' and flagged 'outbreaks of illness' and 'concerns over birds in the buffet areas'. The consumer champion also compared Google's AI overview to Tripadvisor for Britannia hotels, the worst-rated chain in Which?'s hotel survey for more than 10 years. For the Britannia International hotel in London, Google accurately shared that the hotel was 'frequently rated as one of the worst hotel chains in the UK' and further highlighted guest reviews of 'filthy' conditions and 'horrendous' service. Tripadvisor's own summary of the same hotel said guests 'often praise the clean rooms' and described the atmosphere as 'charming'. 'No need to blindly trust AI-generated content' In response to the investigation, a spokesperson for Tripadvisor said, "Our AI Summaries have been designed to uphold the integrity and transparency that has made Tripadvisor trusted by millions of travellers for over 25 years. "They provide snapshots based on high volumes of user-generated content and explicitly are not intended to replace individual reviews. Users can easily click to see the traveller quotes behind each review element or access all reviews for that listing, eliminating any need to blindly trust AI-generated content." Rory Boland, editor of Which? Travel, acknowledged that users can still fact-check its summaries against real reviews, but said, "This ignores the fact that [Tripadvisor] made the decision to push these summaries to the very top of the page. This failure to surface critical safety information is unacceptable and potentially life-threatening." Boland advises users to scroll past these summaries and look at guest reviews, particularly one-star ratings, and at reviews on other sites, to make sure their next stay is a safe one.