Travel | TripAdvisor drops list of dirtiest hotels

Each January in recent years, the online travel review site TripAdvisor.com has kicked up storms of publicity and protests by releasing its scathing lists of the "dirtiest hotels" in the world.

But not this year. TripAdvisor has abandoned the widely cited lists of the grungiest lodgings in various regions of the world, including the United States. "We want to stay more on the positive side, so we'll continue to feature the best destinations, the top hotels," said Stephen Kaufer, the chief executive. "We're slicing and dicing the'best of' in different ways this year, more than focusing on the negative."

So that's the end of annual collections of reviewer comments like these about various unfortunate properties that made previous world's dirtiest lists such amusing reading (assuming you did not own any of the hotels in question): "'Made me think of my own grave,''A level of filth and discomfort that mere neglect could never produce,''If Hell had a hotel it would be something like this."'

The insults ranged from the hyperbolic if plausible ("Dust so thick we could have knitted our own blanket.") to the clearly absurd ("Chewing-tobacco spit oozing down the halls and corridors.")

As I note their passing, however, allow me to employ the same kind of sarcasm that characterized the lists: "Looks like snarky TripAdvisor pulls its punches, accentuates the positive, eliminates the negative, now that it has been spun off by Expedia as a separate publicly traded company and it feels competition from the new Google travel site breathing over its shoulder."

Kaufer denied that TripAdvisor was retreating from hard-hitting online opinion. Of the dirty hotels lists, in particular, he said, "One of the reasons we did it was for the PR and awareness" of the TripAdvisor brand. Now, he added, "We're less interested in that angle."

Instead, TripAdvisor recently ran a list of the "Top 15 U.S. Travel Destinations on the Rise for 2012." That followed last month's list of "10 of the Top Quirkiest New Year's Eve Celebrations in America."

While it eliminated the acerbic lists, TripAdvisor continues to publish the usual wide range of opinions, favorable and unfavorable, that its users generate.

Kaufer founded TripAdvisor in 2000, and the company was sold in 2004, later becoming a subsidiary of Expedia. After being spun off in December by Expedia, TripAdvisor began trading independently on the Nasdaq global market. TripAdvisor maintains travel sites in 21 languages in 30 countries, and operates 18 other travel-related sites, including Seatguru.com, Airfarewatchdog.com, Cruisecritic.com and Smartertravel.com. The company has more than 50 million user-generated travel reviews on its various sites.

Like many business travelers, I believe in the general wisdom of both word-of-mouth and crowd-sourced opinion. Like many of you, before I make a reservation at a hotel or restaurant unknown to me, I consult the voluminous reviews on TripAdvisor. I hate to say this, but like a growing number of travelers, I also tend to ignore reviews in guidebooks and other traditional professionally generated travel opinion sources. I think the traditional guidebook reviews tend to be out of date and not comprehensive.

In its few-holds-barred approach to crowd-sourced opinion, of course, TripAdvisor has run into legal opposition from outraged hoteliers who felt stung by insulting reviews. TripAdvisor points out that it is not legally responsible for online opinions by third parties — that is, the legions of TripAdvisor amateur reviews — though it does try to eliminate the occasional reviews that appear to be from fake sources, whether a hotelier's helpful brother-in-law or his hated rival down the road.

"There no question about whether we can publish reviews that express positive or negative opinion," Kaufer said. "No one has successfully challenged that anywhere in the globe."

Though it is by far the dominant player in online travel reviewing, TripAdvisor has many online competitors. If I started to name them here, my inbox would quickly fill up with protests from those who felt slighted. But as the 500-pound gorilla in online reviewing, TripAdvisor is most worried about a looming threat from Google, which is busily building its own online and mobile travel review empire in Google Places.

"I think Google when I think of down-the-road competition, because they control a phenomenal amount of traffic on the Internet," Kaufer said. "They could, and they have a history of doing so, push search traffic into their own product, rather than just going head-to-head with us." He didn't go too much further into discussing that potential threat, however.

After all, one thing the 500-pound gorilla knows well is not to upset the 1,000-pound gorilla.