Review websites under attack
The Sydney Morning Herald, 12th November 2012: Review websites under attack
UK-based “reputation management” company Kwikchex Ltd first went after TripAdvisor in an attempt to limit damaging reviews of hotels and has now launched a successful action against the consumer ratings company Skytrax Research, which runs airlinequality.com and also the world’s most highly rated annual air travel awards, the World Airline Awards.
Kwikchex sought and received rulings from the UK Advertising Standards Authority – against TripAdvisor in January this year and against Skytrax last week. Both companies were found to have made unsubstantiated claims in their advertising.
Kwikchex had attacked “exaggerated claims by TripAdvisor regarding the trustworthiness of reviews on their website, which are all unsubstantiated - without even verification that authors of comments left on the site are genuine customers of the businesses they were reviewing”.
“We know that a substantial number are false - both positive and negative reviews and this has been proven many times,” Kwikchex said.
The Australian, 3rd June 2011 PR agents conceal celebrity sins from search engines
"Chris Emmins, co-founder of Kwikchex, said he had been approached in the past week by three celebrities who panicked after seeing how quickly the footballer Ryan Giggs's name had been spread online.
The company turned down the work "on principle", but the three men - an actor, an author, and a politician - all wanted to stop the fact they had obtained injunctions over extramarital affairs being spread online. The politician "was also hoping it would help keep it from his wife", Mr Emmins said. Original Article: The Times. Above excerpt and full article on: www.theaustralian.com
The Sydney Morning Herald, 2nd December 2010 TripAdvisor’s ‘worst’ review lists could backfire
"Now, a British reputation management company, KwikChex, is gathering unhappy hotel owners and travel providers in a group to fight back. It's threatening to file class action suits in Britain and the United States for defamation and libel unless TripAdvisor changes its policies."
"The problem for TripAdvisor is its repeated use of edited reviews to generate "Worst" lists. That seems to put them legally at risk because if they are creating these lists based simply on bad reader reviews, how do they take ownership for the ranking that they know can destroy someone's business?"
Above excerpts and full article on: www.smh.com.au
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