The Ethicist - Tourist Retractions

I recently spent several days at a relatively expensive hotel. The place was deplorable and unsanitary, with an unresponsive front desk. I gave it a poor write-up on TripAdvisor.com, the travel website, titling my review “An Overpriced Dung Heap.” The following day, the owner contacted me through the site with an offer to refund almost half the cost of my stay if I would retract my review. I accepted the handsome offer and deleted my post. Who was the most unethical: me (for accepting the bribe), the owner (for offering it) or the site (which enables this chicanery and therefore has untrustworthy reviews)? HOWARD OLARSCH, FLORIDA

In this case, I’d classify the hotel owner as the least ethical actor. But you’re a close second.

TripAdvisor has clear guidelines regarding what business owners can and cannot do about bad reviews, most notably the following: “Owners may not ask reviewers to remove a review” using the TripAdvisor messaging system. Of course, this is not legally binding — and even if it were, there are many other ways an owner could contact a reviewer. Moreover, TripAdvisor has almost no editorial control over the veracity of the reviews it hosts, all of which are written by unvetted writers beholden to nobody. The site can’t necessarily be trusted, and anyone using it has a responsibility to realize that. So I would say TripAdvisor’s ethical breach is the least troubling.

Your decision to remove a review upon the acceptance of a bribe was lame (which you clearly understand). If you were a professional newspaper critic, such behavior would be grounds for termination. You, however, are just an annoyed guy who wrote a free review.

I can’t accurately gauge the depth of your ethical malfunction because I don’t know what your original goal was. If your motive for writing the review was to altruistically warn other travelers, it would seem your integrity has a pretty low price tag — but maybe your true motive was to mock the hotel. Maybe you simply wanted to vent your displeasure in public or to entertain the kind of weirdo who enjoys reading over-the-top TripAdvisor takedowns. Maybe you wrote it hoping you would get a refund. Regardless, you’re an unreliable narrator with no critical credibility.

But the hotel owner is unequivocally unethical. For one thing, he’s ignoring the rules established by TripAdvisor. Granted, he may never have agreed to those policies in the first place, but he’s choosing to involve himself with the site and interfering with a process in which the goal (at least in theory) is consumer transparency. He also did not offer reimbursement as a way to satisfy a customer, but only in exchange for the removal of an honest assessment of his hotel. If this is his normal business practice, it’s almost as if he’s involved with reverse marketing: He overcharges for a bad experience and only offers a rebate to those who inform strangers that this is how he operates.

Similar to Wikipedia, the information on TripAdvisor must be taken with a grain of salt. Everyone has the ability to add reviews to any location, which leads to bias comments based solely on a single person’s experience. However, trends do appear, so the reviews that are considered outliers can be identified. The purpose of this website is to inform future customers of what others thought of the same place. In this case we see a scenario when a hotel bribed someone to remove a negative post. This leads to a series of questions that one should keep in mind while reading reviews from websites such as TripAdvisor: how many of those comments are genuine?, can’t hotels simply pay people to write good things about them (the same way the paid someone to delete a bad review)?, does the site filter or check any of the information provided?

The author sets an order of culpability that goes as follows: the hotel owner, the person who wrote to the ethicist and TripAdvisor, the latter being the most ethical of the three. He claims that the hotel owner should not have gone against the rules established by the website. Besides that, the purpose of his bribe was to remove the comment, rather than try to please an unsatisfied customer. The ethicist even calls this a “reverse marketing” strategy, since the owner is more worried about his hotel’s reputation rather than an individual’s experience.

Secondly, the ethicist criticizes the person who wrote to him, calling his decision to remove his review as “lame,” although we do not know what his intentions were when posting the comment. The answer does not take in consideration the background of the person in question. More specifically, we do not know if he is suffering from any type of financial problem, which could justify him accepting the bribe. However, this also raises the question: does having an economic difficulty give reason for accepting any type of subornation? In this case, personal interest is regarded as more important than following an ethical guideline and leads to other situations where bribery might be considered acceptable.

I will assume that this type of scenario occurs more often than we would like to think so, especially since hotels depend on their image to survive. Reviews are a more personal form of evaluating a hotel, since it establishes a customer-to-customer relationship between people who have gone to a certain hotel and those who are researching it. TripAdvisor does have specific guidelines that are supposed to prevent this from occurring, but they are not legally binding rules. One may suppose that these guidelines are purposefully not legal in order to prevent complaints coming from big hotel owners, who could easily shut down the website. They are trying to be as neutral as possible in order to keep these owners satisfied with the platform and allow them to ‘go after’ anyone who disproves of their service without any legal repercussions.

The ethicist raises some very important points that justifies how he ranked each of the story’s elements from most to least ethical. I, however, believe that both the hotel owner and the person that accepted the bribe are equally guilty of being unethical. The former is interfering with the site’s guidelines and with the customer’s power to freely voice his opinion. On the other hand, the customer essentially “sold” this right. He could have argued for the hotel to “offer a reimbursement” as the ethicist suggests. By removing his review other customers might fall into the same trap in the future. Also, the hotel should use the reviews as a way to improve their service. By offering a reimbursement, the hotel would try to prove the unsatisfied customer wrong.