TripAdvisor will now flag sexual assault warnings on travel reviews

Tresa Baldas Raquel Rutledge
Detroit Free Press

International travel giant TripAdvisor will now flag sexual assault warnings on reviews, making it easier to find out which hotels and resorts have been the sites of reported sex crimes. 

Rather than have to dig through tens of millions of hotel reviews in search of rape complaints, TripAdvisor users will now be able to click through a filter on each property to see if there are any reviews with safety warnings involving rapes, robberies or druggings.

These are the choke marks that an 18-year-old South African au pair says she suffered after being drugged and raped at a Sandals-owned beaches resort in Jamaica on July 4, 2018. She says Sandals paid her American host family $25,000 and silenced them with a non-disclosure agreement

The new safety measure, announced Tuesday, follows an earlier warning system put in place in the aftermath of a 2017 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel investigation that found the website was removing traveler posts describing sexual assaults and other troubling experiences. TripAdvisor had said the harrowing accounts of rapes and blackouts after consuming small and moderate amounts of alcohol violated the company’s “family friendly” guidelines or in some cases was considered “hearsay.”

Following the Journal Sentinel’s investigation, the company implemented a badge program alerting travelers that a hotel or resort had been the subject of media reports involving sexual assault or other safety issues.  

The latest feature comes after a Detroit Free Press investigation found that several resorts in Jamaica were trying to cover up reports of sexual assaults. Multiple victims spoke to the paper about confidentiality agreements and payoffs by resorts, and reported their assaults on TripAdvisor — though the negative reviews were buried deep on the website and difficult to find.

"This is another opportunity to provide checks and balances on the travel industry," TripAdvisor spokesman Brian Hoyt told the Journal Sentinel. "We want to empower travelers with safety information that keeps them traveling."

The Journal Sentinel's TripAdvisor investigation was sparked in 2017 after a Wisconsin college student drowned at a high-end resort in Mexico. She and her brother had been drinking at the swim-up bar. Her brother nearly drowned next to her. Dozens of travelers began contacting the Journal Sentinel describing their stories of blacking out after consuming small and moderate amounts of alcohol. And they reported trying to warn others on TripAdvisor but being frustrated that the website repeatedly removed their posts.

And the investigation exposed how TripAdvisor muzzled firsthand accounts from dozens of travelers who described blackouts, rapes and other ways they were injured while vacationing in Mexico.

The Journal Sentinel exposed how the company’s policies and practices obscure the public’s ability to fully evaluate the information on its site. Secret algorithms determine which hotels and resorts appear when consumers search. Some hotels pay TripAdvisor when travelers click on their links; some pay commissions when tourists book or travel. 

Nominees to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission said in February 2018 they would look into TripAdvisor's business practices. In an August letter to U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., FTC chairman Joseph Simons said the agency "has a strong interest in protecting consumer confidence in the robust online market for hotel and travel services."

Simons said he was prohibited from disclosing whether the agency was investigating TripAdvisor or releasing findings from an investigation.

"When consumers are unable to post honest reviews of a business, it not only hinders the ability of other consumers to make well-informed purchase decisions but also harms businesses that work hard to earn positive reviews," he said.

RELATED: TripAdvisor removed warnings about rapes and injuries at Mexico resorts, tourists say

RELATED: Nominees to Federal Trade Commission vow to investigate TripAdvisor for deleting reviews

VIDEO: Raquel Rutledge on her story about TripAdvisor

RELATED: Jamaica resorts covered up sexual assaults, silenced victims for years

RELATED: Resorts in Jamaica are facing a 'historic' sexual assault problem

In the wake of the USA TODAY Network investigations, TripAdvisor began devising ways to improve customer access to safety information, Hoyt said. The company's internal researchers had made a startling discovery:  In the last year alone, TripAdvisor found 1,100 reviews that referenced sexual assault claims by travelers worldwide.

Hotel Riu Reggae is an all-inclusive adults-only hotel in Montego Bay, Jamaica.

"One incident is horrible — 1,100 is horrific," Hoyt said. "Having read through many of these accounts, it really motivated us at TripAdvisor to make sure we do right by these survivors and help them find a way to share this information with others."

The Free Press investigation also triggered a security audit of resorts throughout Jamaica, which is expected to be completed in June.

Petition demands change, gains support 

Also facilitating change at TripAdvisor is the mounting public pressure over its review platform illustrated by a Change.org petition this week demanding it make sexual assault warnings more visible to users on its website.

An estimated 500,000 people signed the petition on behalf of a woman named Kay, who said she was raped by a tour guide who came with stellar reviews on TripAdvisor.

After the attack, Kay tried to warn future tourists by leaving a review on the tour guide's TripAdvisor business page. But her reviews were deleted, she said, and her emails to TripAdvisor received no response for weeks.

A petition drive followed.

"The world’s largest travel site shouldn’t recommend women hire rapists for their next vacation," Change.org said in a statement. "TripAdvisor needs to know that Kay isn’t giving up until they make meaningful changes."

TripAdvisor does not recommend or rank businesses; all of that is done by users who visit the site.

Change.org representatives attempted Wednesday to deliver Kay's signatures to TripAdvisor's office in New York. 

The company said no senior managers were available to receive the signatures at their small satellite office in New York. The company headquarters is outside of Boston. TripAdvisor requested that Change.org representatives send the signatures there.

TripAdvisor said it has offered to help Kay get her story out.

"We offered Kay to write a review, she turned it down," said Hoyt, TripAdvisor's spokesperson.

According to Hoyt, TripAdvisor took down Kay's first review because it was not written in the first-person, but rather in the third-person. Company policy requires that if people want to write reviews, good or bad, they have to be firsthand experiences, not someone else saying they heard "this or that'' happened to someone on vacation: that amounts to hearsay. 

According to Hoyt, Kay is concerned about anonymity, though TripAdvisor has tried to accommodate those concerns, he said.

"We offered to help her set up a second anonymous profile where she could leave a nondescript review of what happened to her, and she refused that as well," Hoyt said. "We've given her multiple opportunities to write ... If Kay wants to write a review of what happened to her, we'd let her. She has chosen not to do that."

According to Hoyt, Kay wants TripAdvisor to pull the business listing of the person who allegedly raped her. But the company won't do that, he said, because it has a policy to list every tourism business, good or bad, and make travelers aware of what's out there.

"We have a lot of businesses that are poorly reviewed on TripAdvisor and they would love to get pulled. But we have a policy that every business that's open be listed," Hoyt said. "If we pulled bad businesses off the site, it would enable them to operate in the shadows without any transparency." 

RELATED: Jamaica audits resorts in wake of sexual assault scandal

New Jamaica travel alert

The Free Press investigation into tourist sexual assaults started out as a crime story about two Detroit women who said they were raped at gunpoint at a Jamaican resort last fall, but weren't believed by resort staff and police. The gunman was caught and charged — he was wanted for multiple rapes in a nearby parish — though police initially painted the case as a sex-romp gone wrong. Jamaican tourism and police officials also maintained it was an isolated incident and that sexual assaults rarely happen there.

The suspect is: Scott Dowe, 24, of Jamaica, who was arrested Friday, Sept. 28, 2018 for allegedly raping two Detroit women vacationing in a Jamaican hotel. One of the victims shot Dowe, who jumped from a hotel balcony and fled.

State Department data told a different story: Over seven years, from 2011-2017, 78 Americans reported being raped in Jamaica — that's roughly one U.S. citizen raped a month. The victims include a Michigan woman who said she was gang-raped by three resort lifeguards, her teenage friend who said she lost her virginity to a resort rapist, a Georgia mother who said she was sexually assaulted in the water by a resort employee and an au pair who said she was drugged and raped at a resort.

The State Department also has issued numerous travel alerts warning tourists about Jamaica, the most recent one in April, which states: "Exercise increased caution in Jamaica due to crime ... Sexual assaults occur frequently, including at all-inclusive resorts."

Guests of Sandals Ochi Beach Resort danced the night away to the beats of Music sensation, DJ Tracy Young during day 3 of the grand opening of Sandals Ochi Beach Resort on June 1, 2015 in Ocho Rios, Jamaica.

Contact Tresa Baldas at tbaldas@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter@Tbaldas.