Tripadvisor: The Shed at Dulwich Hoax, Fake Reviews and a ChatGPT App

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Tripadvisor began in 2000 when Stephen Kaufer, frustrated while planning a family vacation, raised $2 million to build a site where travelers could review hotels for each other. By 2004 it drew 5 million unique visitors a month, was bought by IAC, spun off under Expedia, and later went public. It then bought its way into every part of a trip, including Cruise Critic, the vacation rental site FlipKey, the European restaurant booking system TheFork and the tour software company Bokun. The platform grew to roughly a billion reviews on about 8 million establishments, far beyond what human moderators could check. In 2017 journalist Oobah Butler registered his backyard shed as The Shed at Dulwich, had friends post timed glowing reviews, and pushed it to the top-ranked restaurant in London.

Moderation failures went beyond fake ratings. Women who posted warnings about sexual assaults at a Mexican resort had their reviews deleted, and an antisemitic review of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum was approved until public outcry. Italy's antitrust authority fined the company half a million euros, and UK advertising regulators made it drop the slogan "reviews you can trust." British tourist Craig Barrett posted a warning after his wife was harassed at a Doha hotel; the hotel filed a criminal defamation complaint under Qatari cybercrime law, he was tried in absentia, and he was detained at an airport months later and deported. China banned the app in 2020. Then generative AI arrived, and Tripadvisor lost a third of its web traffic between 2024 and 2025.

• A user on its Chinese platform reviewed 51 Paris restaurants in one month while also reviewing 50 hotels in other countries.
• Australian hotel chain Meriton was fined $3 million for manipulating guest email lists to skew its ratings.
• A consumer survey of about a quarter million reviews found one in seven showed signs of being fabricated.
• CEO Matt Goldberg merged the main platform with subsidiary Viator to sell experiences, and the company made a $430 million acquisition of its own holding company.
• In late 2025 Tripadvisor launched a native app inside ChatGPT for planning trips through conversation.