An investigation by a consumer campaign organization has revealed that Tripadvisor’s AI-generated hotel review summaries are glossing over serious guest complaints, including allegations of sexual harassment, raw chicken served to guests, and severe hygiene issues.
The Guardian reports that the investigation by consumer organization Which? uncovered troubling discrepancies between actual guest reviews and the AI-generated summaries designed to help travelers make booking decisions. In multiple cases, the AI tool glossed over or failed to accurately represent serious concerns raised by hotel guests.
One striking example involved a hotel in Cape Verde, the darlings of the World Cup, which the AI summary described as popular with spacious rooms, diverse restaurants earning rave reviews, and spotless cleanliness. However, actual customer reviews on Tripadvisor painted a drastically different picture. Guests reported being served raw chicken, shared photographs showing flies and birds on the buffet, and documented dead mice near sitting areas. One guest whose entire family became ill wrote that the place would destroy holidays. The hotel chain is currently 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 has since been removed from the platform.
The investigation identified additional concerning examples. For a Dominican Republic hotel, the AI praised abundant amenities while only acknowledging inconsistent cleanliness and maintenance issues. In reality, guests reported having to shower with bottled water because taps ran dry, and every other person in a large wedding party became sick.
At a Turkish hotel, guests wrote about feeling unsafe due to repeated sexual harassment from male hotel staff, including unwanted requests to connect on social media. Despite these serious allegations, the AI summary described the service as friendly and merely noted that lapses in service were noted by a few guests.
Tripadvisor acknowledged it was monitoring and refining its AI tool and investigating the examples where reviews did not match the intended property. However, the company maintained confidence in the system, stating: “These features are delivering exactly what they were designed to do: help travelers quickly understand the breadth of feedback while making it easy to explore the underlying reviews in full.”
The travel website emphasized that AI-generated summaries do not replace traveler reviews and that customers have the common sense to check any AI advice against the more than one billion reviews and contributions it has collected.
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 noted that its systems automatically suppress AI summaries when travelers warn about serious safety incidents such as death, drugging, or sexual assault, helping ensure this content remains highly visible to the community.
Duncan Brumby, a professor of human-computer interaction at University College London, said the findings align with his own research into academics using AI during the peer-review process. He found that AI tends to sanitize and rub off the edges of sharper criticisms, likely because the bulk of training data contains many more bland observations.
Brumby explained: “Here you have guests describing a really negative experience, but the AI has decided to tone it down. It’s as if it’s being polite.”
Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall describes AI as having great potential on the positive side, but also having the same danger as a landmine for America’s future. When AI tools purport to summarize reviews but instead push bland feedback while failing to mention serious problems, companies have inadvertently stepped on an AI landmine. Hall has written his instant bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.
Read more at the Guardian here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.