TripAdvisor removing warnings of rape, tainted alcohol at Mexican resorts, travellers say

WARNINGS about travellers getting raped and poisoned are being removed from TripAdvisor, raising furious accusations of censorship.

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TRAVELLERS are accusing reviews website TripAdvisor of deleting and muzzling their first-hand accounts of rape, blackouts and other injuries suffered during holidays in Mexico.

Fox News reports an external investigation published this week by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel comes days after US officials called on the State Department and the Office of the Inspector General to conduct additional investigations into Mexican resorts that are serving dangerous, bootleg alcohol.

Dodgy alcohol served at resorts and hotels in Mexico’s tourist hot spots was believed to have claimed the life of American student Abbey Conner, who was found floating in a pool at a five-star resort near Playa del Carmen in January after doing shots with her brother, who also blacked out.

Other American travellers have taken to TripAdvisor to leave warnings of their own experiences with tainted alcohol at various resorts.

Tourists who spoke to the Sentinel said their posts were frequently removed because they were labelled by TripAdvisor as “hearsay.”

“To me it’s like censoring,” Wendy Avery-Swanson of Phoenix told the newspaper after her review of a Mexican resort — in which she said she blacked out after being served alcohol at a swim-up bar — was scrubbed off the website.

“It wasn’t hearsay. It actually happened to me.”

US student Abbey Conner died from suspected tainted alcohol in Mexico in January. Other travellers in Mexico have also raised concerns about tainted grog, leading to a series of government raids at bars and resorts.

Among the other claims reportedly removed from the site:

• Kristie Love, 35, of Dallas, posted in 2010 that she had been raped by a security guard at the Iberostar Paraiso resort near Playa Del Carmen. She wrote in the post that she was followed by the guard, who later overpowered her and raped her in the bushes. She also claimed the hotel staff refused to call police. The post was taken down for violating “family friendly” guidelines, a TripAdvisor moderator ruled, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

• Jamie Valeri, 34, of Wisconsin, wrote in 2015 she was sexually assaulted and her husband suffered a broken hand at the same resort after they blacked out in the middle of the day, just into their third drink. Ms Valeri’s account was corroborated by the newspaper through receipts, email and phone records, medical reports and interviews. Yet TripAdvisor removed her posts, calling them “hearsay”.

• Josh Resmini tried to post a review of the Grand Velas Riviera Maya resort on October 16 in which he claimed he was drugged and sexually assaulted by a massage therapist. He told the newspaper the hotel denied responsibility and a day after filing the review, TripAdvisor told him it would not be allowed to be published, once again, citing “hearsay” as the reason.

The Massachusetts-based travel giant says it employs hundreds of people to police the content of its 535-million user reviews of hotels and restaurants around the world and uses software to detect fake ones.

TripAdvisor gets money from some hotels when tourists click on their links, while others pay commissions for bookings, the Sentinel reported.

But still, the company insists it keeps its money-generating deals with booking partners and hotel chains like Iberostar separate from the user-generated content.

Iberostar Hotels & Resorts told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that it has “zero tolerance for any type of illegal or inappropriate conduct” on its property grounds, and that it investigated Ms Love’s case and others, but none of the women decided to push forward in their cases.

Cancun beach panorama view, Mexico

Ms Love said she did return to Mexico a few weeks after the incident to file police reports but the chief couldn’t get the resort company to co-operate with the investigation. The police chief was found shot dead in his car months later.

“I just needed to be able to lay my head at night and know I did the best I could and I felt like I did the best I could in getting the word out,” she told the Sentinel in her effort to post her story on TripAdvisor’s website.

On October 19, seven years to the day after the alleged attack, her original post was republished on the site, but was buried deep in a forum behind thousands of other more recent posts.

“We apologise to the sexual assault victim, reported on in the article, who had her forum post removed seven years ago on TripAdvisor,” Brian Hoyt, senior director of communications for TripAdvisor, told Fox News.

“Since 2010, when the forum post was removed, our policies and processes have evolved to better provide information like this to other travellers. As a result, when recently brought to our attention, the victim’s initial forum post was republished by our staff.”

Mr Hoyt says internet searches “will show numerous reviews from travellers over the last several years who wrote about their first-hand experiences that include matters of robbery or theft, assault and rape.”

He added: “We believe any first hand experience should be posted to our site as a means to communicate to other consumers looking for information on where they should travel.”

Mr Hoyt said the company is creating a “badge” notification to apply to businesses to “alert consumers of health and safety or discrimination issues at that business reported on within the media or other credible sources of information.”

But had Ms Love’s post been up there all along, “maybe we wouldn’t have gone or maybe that wouldn’t have happened to me,” Ms Valeri said.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel also reported an unknown number of TripAdvisor users are allowed to delete forum posts and there is no way to know how many negative reviews on the site are withheld or scrubbed. The average rating of all the hotels on the website is 4 out of 5 stars, it added.

“This is a major problem with online reviews, they’re heavily skewed,” Bart De Langhe, an associate professor of marketing at ESADE business school in Barcelona, who studies consumer behaviour, told the Sentinel.

“We live in this illusion of perfect information … but we don’t ask the hard questions and don’t realise the information is imperfect and biased.”

This article originally appeared on Fox News and was reproduced with permission.