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When browsing Tripadvisor, holidaymakers will now find an AI summary at the top of the page for the hotel they are looking at.
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These summaries may look useful in giving quick and easy information about the property, but in some cases scrolling down to guest reviews tells another story, according to a recently released investigation by UK consumer champion Which?.
‘Spotless’ hotel with a history of food poisoning
Tripadvisor’s AI summary describes the five-star, all-inclusive, Riu Palace Santa Maria in Cape Verde as ‘popular with many travellers’, with ‘spacious rooms’, ‘diverse restaurants’ that earn ‘rave reviews’ and cleanliness summarised as ‘spotless’.
However, recent reviews on Tripadvisor paint a very different picture.
Guests at the Riu Palace reported ‘exceptionally poor hygiene’, ‘no basic cleaning or hygiene standards’ and food that was ‘awful, bland, unsafe and inedible’.
One guest said she was served raw chicken; another shared photographs of flies and birds in the buffet food and another spotted ‘dead little roasted mice by the sitting area’ on her ‘nightmare’ holiday. One guest whose whole family fell ill wrote: ‘This place will destroy holidays, and [has the] potential to take lives.’
When Which? checked in March this year, there were 102 mentions of food poisoning at the Riu Palace.
The resort also had 32 one- and two-star reviews posted between December 2025 and April 2026 alone, 14 of which say at least one member of the party fell seriously ill with some form of food poisoning. Many were hospitalised, some flew home early and one guest died this year.
The hotel is now involved in a group legal action representing at least 412 holidaymakers who say they became ill after staying at the property, with seven deaths reported since 2023.
Another of Tripadvisor’s AI tools, an interactive trip planning bot called Ollie, also failed to warn holidaymakers about poor hygiene. When asked directly about the risk of contracting food poisoning at the Riu Palace, Ollie said food poisoning was ‘quite unlikely’, and that the resort had a ‘strong reputation for high hygiene standards’.
AI summaries downplay serious issues
When Which? asked Tripadvisor about its AI summaries, it said it prioritises ‘transparency and impartiality’ and its summaries ‘surface a range of both positive and negative community feedback associated with listings’.
Tripadvisor also told Which? that AI chat assistant tool Ollie ‘draws from a selection of reviews based on detail and recency, and matches by language and context’, but it added that it is a ‘product in development’, and that it is now actively looking into several examples the consumer champion provided where reviews did not match.
The Riu Palace wasn’t the only hotel that Which? found serious reports of food poisoning missing from its Tripadvisor AI summary.
Several guests who stayed at Garza Blanca resort in Cancun in the past 12 months also left reviews saying they fell ill, including a wedding party. Yet Tripadvisor’s AI overview is once again glowing, describing ‘immaculate cleanliness’, adding that its dining options ‘earn [it] positive feedback’.
Another example was the Occidental Caribe in the Dominican Republic. Recent reviewers called it a ‘disaster and disturbing’ as recently as March 2026. Another called it the ‘worst place imaginable’.
One guest said her room smelled of sewage and that half of the 68-person wedding party she’d travelled with fell ill. Someone who visited in January reported that the whole hotel smelled of mould. Several mentioned the lack of access to running water – one guest resorted to showering with bottled water.
In contrast, the AI review summary talks about the hotel’s ‘abundant’ amenities, with only a vague nod to ‘inconsistent’ cleanliness and ‘maintenance issues’.
AI describes sexual harassment as ‘lapses in service’
There are other dangers Tripadvisor’s AI summaries don’t share. At Kaia Coracesium on the Antalya coast in Turkey, several reviewers who visited last summer wrote they felt unsafe due to repeated sexual harassment from male hotel staff, including inappropriate jokes and gestures, and repeated requests to connect on social media.
Two different guests reported that a male member of staff followed their daughters to request their social media details. In one of these cases, the reviewer says a restaurant worker followed her up the stairs to her room.
The Tripadvisor AI review summarises the service as ‘friendly’. The closest it comes to referring to these serious allegations is: ‘Lapses [in service] noted by a few’.
AI makes reviews ‘easy to digest’
This suggests that the company’s AI systems are capable of identifying and referencing these allegations, recognising that concerns raised by even a minority of reviewers may warrant inclusion in its summaries.
However, questions remain as to why such references do not appear consistently and, when they do, why the language used appears to minimise their significance.
Tripadvisor said its summaries “use large language models and natural language processing to read recent reviews, identify the most common themes and then turn those themes into short, plain-English overviews”, and that its goal was to “make content from Tripadvisor’s reviews and opinions as easy as possible to digest, but also to capture and highlight the broad spectrum of positive and negative opinion without favouring one sentiment or the other”.
It told Which? that summaries are updated on a monthly basis “and are rooted in the previous 12 months of reviews at the time of each update”, and that reviews are treated equally regardless of rating, highlighting what reviewers mention most often.
For comparison, Which? looked at rival platforms’ approach to AI summaries for hotels. Google manages context in their AI summaries far better. Google’s overview for the Riu Palace warned of ‘potential for illness’ and flagged ‘outbreaks of illness’ and ‘concerns over birds in the buffet areas’.
The consumer champion also compared Google’s AI overview to Tripadvisor for Britannia hotels, the worst-rated chain in Which?’s hotel survey for more than 10 years.
For the Britannia International hotel in London, Google accurately shared that the hotel was ‘frequently rated as one of the worst hotel chains in the UK’ and further highlighted guest reviews of ‘filthy’ conditions and ‘horrendous’ service. Tripadvisor’s own summary of the same hotel said guests ‘often praise the clean rooms’ and described the atmosphere as ‘charming’.
‘No need to blindly trust AI-generated content’
In response to the investigation, a spokesperson for Tripadvisor said, “Our AI Summaries have been designed to uphold the integrity and transparency that has made Tripadvisor trusted by millions of travellers for over 25 years.
“They provide snapshots based on high volumes of user-generated content and explicitly are not intended to replace individual reviews. Users can easily click to see the traveller quotes behind each review element or access all reviews for that listing, eliminating any need to blindly trust AI-generated content.”
Rory Boland, editor of Which? Travel, acknowledged that users can still fact-check its summaries against real reviews, but said, “This ignores the fact that [Tripadvisor] made the decision to push these summaries to the very top of the page. This failure to surface critical safety information is unacceptable and potentially life-threatening.”
Boland advises users to scroll past these summaries and look at guest reviews, particularly one-star ratings, and at reviews on other sites, to make sure their next stay is a safe one.
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