Reliability of reviews on the Internet : The case of TripAdvisor

Given the rampant growth of travel-related user-generated content on the Internet, this paper seeks to investigate the reliability of reviews in TripAdvisor, a popular travel review site. To support the goal, two objectives are submitted. The first is to locate clusters of highly-interlocked hotels that have been evaluated by a common pool of reviewers. This enables review baselines to be established, which in turn facilitates detection of anomalies. The second is to determine the inter-reviewer and intra-reviewer reliability of reviews. Results suggest that reviews in TripAdvisor could be largely reliable. The findings gleaned from the results are discussed.