Key Takeaways
- An investigation by UK consumer group Which? found that Tripadvisor's AI review summaries glossed over serious complaints such as food poisoning and harassment, describing a hotel facing group litigation as 'spotless'
- Tripadvisor pushed back hard, saying it 'fundamentally disagrees' with the premise of the investigation, and explained that AI summaries are automatically suppressed on pages carrying warnings about serious safety incidents
- As AI becomes the entry point for travel decisions and agents begin to execute bookings on users' behalf, the quality and trustworthiness of AI summaries is becoming a core issue for OTAs and booking businesses
What the Which? Investigation Found
AI-generated overview found to gloss over allegations of sexual harassment and describes hotel being sued over hygiene as 'spotless'
www.theguardian.comIn July 2026, UK consumer group Which? published the results of an investigation into the AI review summaries displayed on Tripadvisor hotel pages. According to the Guardian's reporting, the AI summaries treated serious complaints in guest reviews lightly, and in some cases even portrayed hotels facing group litigation in a favorable light.
The most striking example is the Riu Palace Santa Maria, a five-star resort in Cape Verde. The AI summary introduced the hotel as 'popular with many travellers', described its cleanliness as 'spotless', and said its restaurants earned 'rave reviews'. Actual reviews told a different story: guests reported being served raw chicken and seeing flies and birds in the buffet. According to Which?'s tally, there were 102 mentions of food poisoning as of March 2026, and of the 32 one-to-two-star reviews posted between December 2025 and April 2026, 14 described members of the party falling seriously ill. The hotel's operator, RIU Hotels & Resorts, is being sued in the UK High Court by at least 412 guests in a group action over alleged hygiene and food safety failings.
The problems go beyond hygiene. At a hotel in Antalya, Turkey, multiple reviews said guests felt unsafe due to sexual harassment from male staff, yet the AI summary described the service as 'friendly' and only mentioned 'lapses noted by a few'. At a hotel in the Dominican Republic, guests reported showering with bottled water when the mains ran dry, and half of a 68-person wedding party falling ill, while the summary softened all of this into 'inconsistent' cleanliness.
Which? also compared the results with Google's AI summaries. For London's Britannia International, Google reported that the property is 'frequently rated as one of the worst hotel chains in the UK', while Tripadvisor's AI claimed guests 'often praise the clean rooms' and described a 'charming' atmosphere. When Which? asked the company's AI chatbot Ollie about the risk of food poisoning at the Riu Palace, it reportedly answered that it was 'quite unlikely' and that the resort had a 'strong reputation for high hygiene standards'.
Tripadvisor's Rebuttal
Tripadvisor responded to the criticism in strong terms. The company said it 'fundamentally disagrees' with the premise of the investigation, explaining that AI summaries are snapshots based on high volumes of user-generated content and are not intended to replace individual reviews. Because users can click through from each element of a summary to the underlying traveller quotes, there is, in the company's words, no need to 'blindly trust AI-generated content'.
The company also described its safety mechanisms. On pages carrying traveller warnings about serious safety incidents such as death, drugging or sexual assault, it says a safeguard automatically suppresses the AI summary so that those reviews remain highly visible. It added that 'no review content has been suppressed or hidden by the introduction of these tools', and called the suggestion that the summaries pose a danger to travellers 'an unfounded claim that seems designed to generate controversy'.
At the same time, Tripadvisor acknowledged it is actively looking into examples where reviews did not match the intended property. It described the chatbot Ollie as a product in development and said it would use the feedback to improve the traveller experience. RIU, for its part, responded that it operates to international standards certified by external specialist firms, with hygiene and safety as its top priority.
Why AI Summaries Sand Down Complaints
Rather than a Tripadvisor-specific implementation error, this episode reflects a structural quirk of review summarization technology. Duncan Brumby, a professor of human-computer interaction at University College London, told the Guardian that he has observed the same phenomenon in his research into academics using AI during peer review.
Here you have guests describing a really negative experience, but the AI has decided to tone it down. It's as if it's being polite.
Because the bulk of training data consists of bland, measured writing, Brumby argues, AI tends to sanitize sharp criticism and rub off its edges. The tendency of opinion summarization systems to reduce the richness of consumer feedback to shallow sentiment has also been documented in ACL research. And in January 2026, Google removed some of its AI health summaries over misleading information, showing that AI summary quality is now a cross-platform problem.
What This Means for Booking Businesses as AI Becomes the Front Door to Travel
The reason this investigation carries weight is that AI summaries are no longer a bolt-on feature. Travelers increasingly compare hotels and narrow down destinations starting from AI chat and summaries. With OTAs racing to introduce AI-powered discovery and planning features, the first impression an AI presents already shapes booking decisions.
In the context of agentic commerce, the problem sharpens further. In a world where AI agents select accommodation and execute bookings on a user's behalf, the last line of defense disappears: no human scrolls down to the one-star reviews. If the summaries and review data an agent consumes are biased, that bias transfers directly into the outcome of the transaction. Rory Boland, editor of Which? Travel, said the platform 'has a responsibility to revisit the accuracy of its AI summaries and AI chatbot' — a comment that resonates precisely in this context.
For operators, two lessons stand out. First, any business that summarizes or leverages reviews and UGC with AI needs to build the detection and weighting of negative information into the design from the start. Tripadvisor's automatic suppression of summaries for serious incidents can be read as one example of this. Second, as more traffic arrives via AI, summary errors rebound not as isolated mishaps but as a brand trust problem. In this case, the reliability of Tripadvisor's core asset — more than a billion reviews and contributions — was itself called into question.
Conclusion
The Which? investigation documented concrete cases in which Tripadvisor's AI review summaries obscured serious complaints ranging from food poisoning to harassment. Tripadvisor strongly disputes the premise of the investigation, while also signaling that it is examining the flagged examples and refining its tools.
As AI becomes the entry point for travel decisions and agents move toward executing bookings end to end, the quality and trustworthiness of AI summaries is turning into a foundational issue for booking businesses. How a platform lets AI handle its review assets is now a design question that will determine whether users continue to trust it.
