AI-generated overviews of Tripadvisor hotel reviews downplay serious complaints, including allegations of sexual harassment and hygiene failures, according to an investigation by consumer campaign organisation Which? The AI summaries, designed to help holidaymakers decide where to book, were found to gloss over critical feedback.
AI summaries sanitise guest experiences
In one case, the AI described the Riu Palace Santa Maria in Cape Verde as popular, with spacious rooms, diverse restaurants that earn rave reviews, and spotless cleanliness. However, guests reported being served raw chicken, photographed flies and birds on the buffet, and found dead roasted mice near the sitting area. A guest whose family fell 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 and food safety failings. The AI-generated review for this hotel is no longer available. RIU Hotels & Resorts stated: "We operate with the highest standards of professionalism and service, placing hygienic-sanitary safety as our top priority."
Other examples of downplayed complaints
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 mains taps ran dry, and that every other person in a large wedding party became sick. Meanwhile, at a hotel in Turkey, guests wrote that they felt unsafe due to repeated sexual harassment from male staff, including requests to connect on social media. The AI summary described the service as "friendly" and merely said "lapses noted by a few."
Tripadvisor's response
Tripadvisor said it was monitoring and refining its AI tool and was looking into examples where reviews did not match the intended property. 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." The company added that AI summaries do not replace travellers' reviews and that customers have the common sense to check AI advice against the billion-plus reviews and contributions it has gathered. Tripadvisor also said its systems automatically suppress AI summaries when travellers warn about serious safety incidents such as death, drugging, or sexual assault.
Expert commentary
Rory Boland, 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." Duncan Brumby, a professor of human-computer interaction at University College London, said the case chimed with his own research on AI in peer review. He found AI tends to "sanitise and rub off the edges" of sharper criticisms, likely because training data contains many 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 that technologies designed to summarise opinions often 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.
