About 8 % of 31.1 million reviews provided to Tripadvisor in 2024 were fake, according to the company’s transparency report 2025.
This is more than twice the number that was discovered in 2022, according to the company’s reports.
Becky Foley, Vice President and President of TripDvisor, said, but this does not mean that the number of fake reviews on the site has doubled.
She said that with the increasing requests on the site, the Tripadvisor policies on fake reviews also changed, noting the position of the most aggressive company against “stimulating reviews”. These happen when companies offer discounts for customers or free in exchange for reviews, or providing incentives for employees whose names are mentioned in the reviews.
She said: “The employees get their mother, the best friend or their cousin to present reviews, with their names mention.” “It ends up that companies with reviews that are not of value in reality for our society.”
What is a fake review?
According to Tripadvisor, “Any review provided by a person who intentionally submitted a biased or unique content, in an attempt to manipulate the reputation of property.”
She said there is a greater reason for the high detection.
“Our system is always improving,” she said, citing the three aspects of Tripadvisor, which depends on automatic scrutiny, human review and societal comments.
The report said that about 7 % of the presentations in 2024 were automatically rejected before it was published. The automatic objections also indicated another 5 % of the presentations for human review.
However, the Tripadvisor team ultimately managed more than 4.2 million reviews, reaching more than 13 % of all requests in 2024, according to the report.
The report showed that 244,000 reviews are disputed by members of the third stage of the review. Of these, about 72 % remained on the site, and 28 % were removed.
How to discover a fake
Foley said that Tripadvisor has four categories of fake servers: reinforcement, sabotage, member fraud and paid reviews.
Foley said there is a wrong belief that sabotage represents most of the fake reviews, adding that reinforcement (54 %) and member fraud (39 %) have formed the bulk of these reviews.
She said that paid reviews (4.8 %) are a smaller but “more harmful” category than fake.
She said this includes “a farmer review”, adding that these authors are often involved in other types of online fraud as well.
Foley said that most of the reviews paid in Asia are established in Asia, although only 17 % of real introductions came from the continent last year.
In 2024, more than a third of all paid submitted by Tripadvisor from Indonesia and Vietnam, while most of the paid reviews came in 2022 from India.
“Cat and Mouse” game
Foley said that getting rid of fake reviews is the continuous “cat and mouse” game. She said Tripadvisor is improving its discovery every year.
“We are the first to admit that we will not reach absolute perfection,” said Foley. “We may not pick up (fake) the first time, but we will eventually receive it.”
She said that Tripadvisor uses its own technology, which has been developed for 25 years, to expel the falsehoods – a system that increases on what the review says, and more on how to publish it. The company uses artificial and behavioral vital measurements to find patterns, which can discover distortions such as serving mutations and attempts to hide the IP address.
Foley said that to arrest the paid auditors, Tripadvisor investigators as a fake review brokers. When a bad -paid actor publishes a first paid review, “We have all the data … hundreds of data associated with it”, which the company uses to build patterns to determine other reviews provided by the author in the past.
Foley said that violators are not withdrawn from the site, but their classifications are punished for a year. She said that repeated criminals are receiving a red badge in their list, “she says that these properties are trying to deceive you.”
Amnesty International Reviews: Not fake, but not allowed
Foley said that most of the reviews written by artificial intelligence are not fake, describing that “one of the myths that I like to tear.”
Most of them were written by ordinary travelers who use technology to make their writings more polished.
However, the company does not allow them – at least not now.
In 2024, Tripadvisor removed more than 200,000 suspects suspected of Amnesty International, according to the 2025 transparency report of the company.
“We will continue to monitor trends and patterns. But now, we don’t want travelers to Tripadvisor to get a sea of similarity.”
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