According to multiple reports, TripAdvisor is actively sweeping under the rug travelers’ warnings of sexual assault, injury, and death during their travels.
For instance, one traveler recalled that she routinely dined out with her family at Rams Head Tavern near Baltimore, MD, but she had no idea that somebody had installed a hidden camera in women’s bathroom’s floor to spy on them.
That traveler found out from a newspaper that the owner of the venue was taken into custody for secretly videotaping female customers while using the bathroom. The woman said that her initial thought was to warn other women on TripAdvisor about the issue.
But her post reading ‘Oh my goodness, this guy is running a Peeping Tom camera’ was removed the next day. According to TripAdvor, the woman’s post infringed the company’s rules.
The woman and her husband considered that the information was vital for other users’ safety, but TripAdvisor took three years to report the message. However, the negative review did not appear on the restaurant’s review page for everybody to see.
TripAdvisor Routinely Deleting Unflattering Reviews
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel also found that the world’s largest travel site routinely silenced recounts from travelers about injuries, blackouts, rapes, and even deaths at the resorts they visited in other countries.
Dozens of people told the Sentinel that their posts detailing horrific experiences had been taken down.
The Federal Trade Commission is now probing the company, according to Sen. Tammy Baldwin who had advocated for the investigation.
FTC’s chairman Maureen Ohlhausen noted that the agency has been shocked by the company’s business practice of deleting posts that could prevent harm to other consumers. Other businesses work hard to earn their positive reviews, Ohlhausen noted.
On Tuesday, the lawyer of the family of the woman who was found dead at a Mexican resort in January, and whose story vanished from TripAdvisor’s website, said that at least 30 people contacted him to tell him about their deleted posts.
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