Tripadvisor AI summaries mask serious safety complaints, 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.