Fake hotel reviews? Never on Booking.com, says CEO

The CEO of Booking.com insists her platform never has to worry about fake hotel reviews, unlike competitors such as TripAdvisor.

“With Booking.com, it’s always real,” Gillian Tans said during a one-to-one video interview with Yahoo Finance UK at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland.

“People cannot leave a review if they haven’t stayed at the property. And it’s a good thing because we know when people actually stay. We don’t have that problem at all,” she said.

TripAdvisor (TRIP) faced a mountain of bad press in 2018 over fake and biased reviews on its site. But the travel competitor said it “uses a combination of technology and detective work to stop fake reviews reaching the site.”

“Review sites have a responsibility to identify and take action against those who try to submit fake reviews. It is a responsibility we take very seriously, and so for more than a decade TripAdvisor has invested in new technology and a team of expert investigators to catch fake reviews,” it said in an online statment.

Booking.com gets commission payments from hotels after the people who book their rooms through the site stay in their accommodation. It also offers customers the option to book flights, car rentals and airport taxis.

The website Booking.com was founded more than two decades ago in the Netherlands and has facilitated more than 1 billion bookings. It has close to 6 million listings globally.

The Amsterdam-headquartered company is part of Booking Holdings (BKNG), which also owns Priceline and OpenTable.

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