Rachit Agarwal / Digital Trends

Planning a trip is stressful enough without wondering if the glowing hotel summary you just read was written by an AI that skipped the scary parts. As it turns out, that might be exactly what’s happening on TripAdvisor.

According to an investigation by consumer group Which?, reported by the Guardian, TripAdvisor’s AI-generated review summaries are smoothing over serious guest complaints, and in some cases, downright dangerous ones.

Can you trust an AI summary of your hotel reviews?

Take, for example, the Riu Palace Santa Maria in Cape Verde. The AI summary called it spotless, with diverse restaurants earning rave reviews. Real guests, on the other hand, described being served raw chicken, flies and birds near the buffet, and even dead mice by the seating area. 

The hotel chain is currently being sued in the High Court by hundreds of guests over alleged illnesses linked to hygiene failures. You wouldn’t know any of that from the AI’s cheerful summary, which has since been taken down.

Rachit Agarwal / Digital Trends

If you thought that was bad, I am sad to inform you that it gets worse. A hotel in Turkey saw guests report repeated sexual harassment from male staff. The AI summary called the service friendly with only a few lapses. 

If someone booked the hotel based on the AI overview of user reviews, they would have no inkling of the horror they would face there. There are several other examples like this that the investigation found. 

Why does AI keep softening bad reviews?

A UCL professor of human-computer interaction, Duncan Brumby, offered a simple explanation. AI models tend to sand down harsh criticism because most of their training data leans bland and polite. So when a guest writes a negative review, the AI sometimes treats it like a minor inconvenience instead.

TripAdvisor says it’s looking into the mismatched summaries and that its systems suppress AI overviews when reviews mention serious safety incidents. It also maintains that these summaries were never meant to replace actual reviews.

Still, the takeaway is simple. Don’t let AI summaries make your travel decisions for you. Scroll past it, read the one-star reviews, and check other sites too. AI summaries have time and again proven to be fraught with inconsistencies, and it’s always good to do your own research, lest your vacation turns into a nightmare.

Rachit is a seasoned tech journalist with over ten years of experience covering the consumer technology landscape.