TripAdvisor has launched an investigation into reviews left for a Nottingham restaurant. The website allows diners to rate hotels, pubs, restaurants and attractions, ranking them from excellent to terrible.
However, a warning has been posted on the page of Caribbean restaurant Turtle Bay at the Cornerhouse - amid concerns that some of the reviews may not be genuine. However, diners posting reviews while still at their tables, using the restaurant's Wi-Fi, have been blamed for the alert.
The message said: "TripAdvisor has grounds to investigate that individuals or entities associated with or having an interest in this property may have attempted to interfere with traveller reviews and/or the Popularity Index for this property. Please take this into consideration when researching your travel plans.
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"We make our best efforts to identify suspicious content and are always working to improve the processes we use to assess traveller reviews."
The restaurant, which serves bottomless brunches, West Indian curries and exotic cocktails, has 3,961 reviews overall. Of those, 2,780 are excellent; 679 very good; 251 average; 120 poor and 125 terrible. Out of 862 restaurants in Nottingham it's in 121st place.
A spokesperson for Turtle Bay said: "At Turtle Bay, we place huge importance on the integrity of our public reviews across TripAdvisor and other feedback platforms. It can be seen on our Nottingham page that our guests have been leaving a mix of positive and negative reviews, and we welcome all feedback across multiple sources to help us continue to improve and enhance the experience for our guests.
"With a highly engaged guest base who enjoy the Turtle Bay experience, we receive a lot of reviews from guests when they are in the restaurant. The volume we receive is high, and these are often from the same IP address via the restaurant Wi-Fi, or location, again as guests are still in the building, which has led to the alert. We have been liaising with TripAdvisor about its removal and expect this to happen soon."
Some of the red flags for fake reviews are a bunch of new reviews at once, mostly from accounts with limited history and short reviews which don't contain many details. In October 2021, TripAdvisor published a transparency report, officially acknowledging that around nine per cent of reviews are fraudulent or biased, requiring them to be removed.
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