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La Scaletta, TripAdvisor’s top restaurant in the northern Italian town of Moniga del Garda, has left a bad taste in the mouth for TripAdvisor…because it doesn’t exist.
The fake restaurant was hatched by the Italian food newspaper “Italia a Tavola” (Italy at the Table), with the help of a group of restaurant owners to prove how easy it is to fake success on the site. They gave it a fake phone number and wrote some reviews. Within a month, on ten “Excellent” reviews, it had passed all the long-standing restaurants in town, including one with 201 “excellents” out of 300 reviews.
Once the restaurant was exposed, TripAdvisor took the listings down within minutes. Its representatives told Italian news media they considered the case “meaningless” because it’s not the kind of fraud they investigate daily. They also called the stunt “unethical.”
It’s not TripAdvisor’s first trouble in Italy. Last August, the main Italian hotel association complained that TripAdvisor was still accepting reviews for a hotel that had closed in 2007. Then, in December, the company was fined €500,000 for “improper commercial practices,” including failing to adopt controls to stop false reviews while advertising its content as “authentic and genuine.”
Photo of Milovice train station restaurant by MOs810 / Wikimedia
