BOURNEMOUTH hoteliers have welcomed a watchdog ruling that should go some way to preventing fraudulent and malicious online customer reviews damaging trade.

Yesterday the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) told the travel website TripAdvisor it could not claim all of its reviews were written by real travellers.

Complaints centred on statements on the TripAdvisor website including “reviews you can trust”, “read reviews from real travellers” and “more than 50 million honest travel reviews and opinions from real travellers around the world”.

The ASA said consumers would take the claims on the website to mean they could be certain that the reviews posted were from genuine travellers.

It said that, as reviews could be placed on the site without verification, it was possible that non-genuine reviews could go undetected.

Andrew Woodland, chairman of Bournemouth Area Hospitality Association, told the Echo: “Anything that can make TripAdvisor a more reputable website is good.”

The case was successfully taken to the ASA by Bournemouth reputation management firm KwikChex.

Hoteliers and B&Bs had complained to them that false reviews could damage business and guests often threatened to put bad reviews on TripAdvisor even if nothing was wrong.

Gemma Bryne, KwikChex operations director, said: “It is small businesses that suffer most as they tend to have few reviews so the impact is much greater – although any business with a recent bad review does suffer.”

TripAdvisor said it used “advanced and highly effective” fraud detection systems and dedicated substantial resources to identifying and minimising any non-genuine content, but said it was “not practical” for them to screen each review manually.