Protestors at a demonstration on Wednesday outside the New York City offices of TripAdvisor.CreditTariro Mzezewa
What she wanted to do was warn others.
In Ethiopia last October, the 30-year-old aid worker went on a group kayaking trip, expecting an enjoyable adventure. Instead it turned into a harrowing ordeal: The woman woke up in her hotel room in the early morning, she said, and found one of the tour guides on top of her. He had broken into her room and raped her, she said, before her roommate woke up and helped restrain the man. The woman, who goes by K — the sound of the first letter of her name — asked that her real name not be used.
K went through the motions — multiple medical exams, a police report, informing her employer — and was medically evacuated from the country. After weeks of therapy, she decided to warn others by writing a review on TripAdvisor. What she assumed would take a few minutes has exploded into a public battle with one of the biggest companies in the travel world.
K said her review wasn’t approved by TripAdvisor because it didn’t meet the platform’s policies, which require all reviews to be written in the first person and posted from the TripAdvisor account of the person who had the experience. K said that would open her up to possible harassment online and expose her identity to colleagues and Ethiopian authorities, who are investigating the incident.
Since then, a petition calling for the company to change its policy has gained more than 500,000 signatures. TripAdvisor announced new changes this week, but K and activists behind the petition say they fall short of what’s needed.
The problem with first-person reviews
In the sharing economy, people increasingly rely on online and often anonymous reviews from others on where to stay, eat, shop and more. They are willing to trust suggestions from strangers because this practice offers convenience and the comfort of multiple, varied experiences. Still, the review system depends on the unspoken expectation that everyone involved is writing truthfully. That comes to a head when safety and security is threatened. Whose responsibility is it to ensure that people see information about unsafe places? How can the information in reviews best be vetted?
TripAdvisor is the world’s largest platform for reviews of travel accommodations and other businesses, and its policy, since the company started accepting user reviews nearly 20 years ago, states that only first-person reviews are allowed to ensure that experiences are authentic and true. People can change user names so other users don’t see their real name, but the account has to be created with a real name and linked to an email address. These reviews and opinions now number around 760 million, written by travelers and reviewed by a combination of human and computer moderation.
Will new search features really help?
On Tuesday, the company rolled out new online features intended to help users find reviews about safety more easily.
“The need for better access to safety information while traveling has never been greater,” Lindsay Nelson, TripAdvisor’s president of core experience, wrote on the company’s blog.
One such feature is a filter that allows users to search specifically for reviews concerning sexual assault and sexual misconduct by employees. TripAdvisor said that it found 1,100 reviews concerning sexual assault from the last year. These reviews are available in 28 languages.
A user must trigger this feature, though. Additionally, if a safety claim has been made against an organization, a notification will automatically appear at the top of a review, alerting users to the issue.
“TripAdvisor has its own posting guidelines to ensure the integrity of our content,” Desiree Fish, a spokeswoman for the company, said. “These guidelines lead to credibility and trust. Not only can we check for fraud, but Travelers want to hear from other travelers about their experiences. It allows them to make an informed decision.”
K is battling the requirement that reviews be written in first person. She said that the man who attacked her runs a one-man, tour-guide business, and he has a 4.5 star rating on the site. “I tried to post a review which was a warning,” she said. “I said ‘this tour guide raped a German tourist,’ but it wasn’t written in first person, so it was rejected.”
Frustrated, K asked friends to leave reviews sharing her experience, but those also did not meet TripAdvisor’s rules.
In emails seen by The Times, a TripAdvisor employee advised K to create an account under a different username where she could write a first-person review without revealing her identity — an option that TripAdvisor has offered other survivors of sexual violence, according to the emails. This, K said, was an unreasonable expectation.
“I’m not leaving a first person, in-detailed, account of my rape,” K said. “I don’t want to be contacted and threatened or trolled, even on a burner account. Why can’t TripAdvisor have someone who can make sure my experience is seen without re-traumatizing survivors?”
After The Guardian published a story about K’s experience, the advocacy group change.org helped start a petition demanding TripAdvisor “stop covering up sexual assaults.” That petition, which currently has more than 522,000 signatures, calls the company out for not removing, penalizing or more visibly marking businesses where people have said they have been attacked.
The petition’s backers took K’s story to the street on Wednesday in a small protest outside TripAdvisor’s New York offices, a day after the platform added the two new safety features.
“It seems like a niche issue,” said Will Decamp, a 28-year-old who works in television development and attended the protest. “But think about TripAdvisor’s global reach. I mean people, so many hundreds of thousands of people, are planning their trips using TripAdvisor. For them not to be aware of some of these issues is dangerous.”
Mr. Decamp and the change.org team believe that the new TripAdvisor features do not go far enough, only addressing the issue of review visibility. They want the company to allow survivors to share their experiences through anonymous channels or not in first person.
“It’s a positive step and they care about the issue and we know that they can do better,” said Molly Dorozenski, senior campaigns director at change.org. “But they haven’t really considered the point of view of the survivor yet.”
K agrees and wants the company to add a hotline or another more private and direct channel for survivors to share their stories.
“They’ve addressed the issue about visibility, but what they haven’t addressed is the issue of making it easier for survivors to leave a review,” K said. “For people who have been assaulted, it is difficult to write a review because it is traumatizing.”
A recurring problem?
This is the second time in two years that TripAdvisor has come under fire for the way it handles user reviews and posts related to sexual assault.
Kristie Love, a 44-year-old from Texas, wrote a post on TripAdvisor about being raped at a resort in Mexico in 2010. But company policy at the time only allowed posts that were “family friendly,” and hers was repeatedly removed. In 2017 her story received widespread attention after it was reported by The Journal Sentinel of Milwaukee.
In the face of criticism, the company changed the family-friendly policy to allow reviews about sexual assault and other forms of violence. It began placing a badge on the pages of properties where sexual assault and other major concerns were said to have occurred. It said that it would make more changes in the future. The badge system has also been criticized.
Ms. Love said she initially felt that TripAdvisor had not made enough changes. Her thinking has changed.
“TripAdvisor isn’t responsible for my rape,” she said. “I don’t believe that TripAdvisor is here to play judge and jury.”
Ms. Love said that she has been following K’s story and that option to leave a review from a “burner account” is reasonable.
“That’s exactly what I was trying to do two years ago,” Ms. Love said. “The best way that we can protect other people is to get the story out there.”
TripAdvisor said that it is continuing to speak with survivors, including K, and to work with organizations to create more useful long-term solutions that keep travelers safe. On Wednesday, the company published a list of tips in partnership with No More, an initiative working to end domestic violence and sexual assault, about how to stay safe during different points of the travel process.
“It is important to note that TripAdvisor is not a law enforcement body, nor is it the arbiter of fact,” the company said in a statement after Wednesday’s protest.
People calling for harsher penalties online for platforms like TripAdvisor often suggest that companies should remove businesses that have been accused of wrongdoing, but companies argue that removing a listing only removes information, making it harder for people to travel safely.
“If TripAdvisor removes a business entirely then nobody knows what happened there,” Ms. Love said. “At least if it’s there people can say ‘I’m not going on that tour or staying in that place.’”
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