It was early evening when Victoria Morley arrived at her €6,000 holiday villa on the Maltese island of Gozo. The five-bedroom farmhouse had been described on TripAdvisor as a “unique experience of luxury accommodation” and Morley had spent her savings on a fortnight’s stay to reunite her family after the recent death of her husband. The luxury turned out to be restricted to the seductive photos on the TripAdvisor listing. “It was dirty, some of the furniture was broken, toilets were blocked, cable TV had been advertised but wasn’t subscribed to, the whirlpool bath didn’t work and the pool had lots of tiles missing,” she says. “The whole place was rundown and, more worryingly, it failed to meet European safety standards, with no fire extinguishers or smoke detectors.”
Morley was unable to find a phone number for TripAdvisor on its website and, since it was getting late, the family went to bed. She emailed the company at 6am the following morning to report her concerns and was called by a representative who assured her that she would be covered by the company’s payment protection scheme.
The ensuing holiday was interrupted by plumbers and builders called to repair leaks and other defects, and by regular emails to TripAdvisor as new evidence of the villa’s condition emerged. At the end of their stay, the company announced that they would not be covered after all, because Morley should have informed them of the problems on arrival, then vacated the property. “We weren’t told this at the time and we would in any case have been unable to find another property at such short notice,” she says. “With my two autistic sons and an 85-year-old mother in our party it wasn’t viable to walk out with all our luggage in the evening, after a long day of travelling and with nowhere to go.”
Morley tried to claim via PayPal’s buyer protection scheme, but was told that since the accommodation had been “delivered”, it could not help. She could not issue a claim via her credit card issuer because transactions through third-party payment systems, such as PayPal, are not covered by section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act. The only agency to act on her complaint was the Maltese tourist board, which barred the owner from renting the property again until it complied with safety standards. However, the listing remains on TripAdvisor’s website.
Morley’s experience was a painful lesson in the lack of protection available to travellers who book through comparison platforms such as TripAdvisor, Skyscanner or TravelSupermarket. And it serves as a warning to those who, in the wake of the collapse of Thomas Cook and other travel companies, decide to organise a holiday themselves.
Unlike most travel agents and tour operators, comparison platforms are not members of Abta or Atol, which offer insurance-backed safety nets and, in the case of Abta, a code of practice and arbitration. Nor can travellers rely on the Package Travel and Linked Travel Arrangements Regulations, which offer degrees of protection when two or more components of a holiday are booked through a single provider. Because bookings via comparison platforms are made directly with a hotel, airline or travel agent, they don’t count if the provider for each part differs. TripAdvisor only handles payments for private accommodation rentals, like Morley’s, but the contract is with the property owner, so customers who book a flight as well are unprotected.
Confusingly, bookings via similar-seeming websites, such as Ebookers or Hotels.com, may be covered under the regulations because they are brokers and handle all transactions themselves. A trawl through the usually well-hidden terms and conditions can be the only way to distinguish between a broker and comparison site.
Moreover, while travel agents and tour operators must take responsibility for the accuracy of their adverts, travel platforms are not necessarily held to account for misleading listings. According to the Advertising Standards Authority, the advertiser is usually held liable, rather than the platform hosting the advert, and substandard accommodation is a matter for council trading standards departments which, as Morley was to discover, won’t help if the advertiser is based abroad. This leaves the courts as the only recourse for dissatisfied customers.
Last month the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced a crackdown on hotel booking sites to ensure they complied with consumer protection law. Twenty-five firms, including TripAdvisor, Skyscanner and Travelsupermarket, agreed to commit to make their websites fairer and more transparent. The move followed enforcement action against six sites (which did not include TripAdvisor, Skyscanner or Travelsupermarket) that had been found to have exploited customers with pressure-selling tactics, hidden fees and misleading discount claims.
“Sites have a responsibility to ensure the information on their platforms is reliable and, if they continue to fall short, they should be compelled to make changes so holidaymakers are no longer at risk of being duped by dodgy reviews or misleading photographs,” says Which? Travel’s Naomi Leach. “We have exposed sites like TripAdvisor for failing to take action on activity, such as suspicious hotel reviews that artificially boost rankings, as well as glossy marketing photos used by accommodation owners that turn out to be a far cry from reality.” Tripadvisor responded that it is “aggressive” in catching fakes.
TripAdvisor eventually paid Morley €1,000 for the “inconvenience” after pressure from the Observer. It insisted that she had breached the terms of its payment protection policy by spending the first night in the property and claimed that when she contacted customer services the following dawn, the money for her stay had already been released to the villa owner, who offered a €200 “refund”. Moreover, it said its policy does not cover “maintenance issues with amenities or services” only “material differences” between a listing and the reality, a distinction which will be lost on travellers who find a pool exists but is filthy, or a garden too overgrown to use.
However, it accepts Morley was misinformed. “An agent incorrectly advised that Ms Morley would be covered by our payment protection policy, but [as] this was the second day of Ms Morley’s booking, this was not the case,” said a spokesperson. “We fell short of the standards which we hold ourselves to on this occasion, which is disappointing, and we hope the gesture of goodwill helps to make up for this inconvenience.”
The company states that it always works with travellers and property managers to resolve problems. It confirms that although the substandard villa was delisted by the property agent, a listing for the same property under a different name by the owner remains on the site.
Morley hopes that her experience will warn others of the pitfalls of DIY holidays. “Travellers need to be aware of the complaints system and not think they can sleep on a situation, no matter how jetlagged they are,” she says. “TripAdvisor is a fantastic resource for researching holidays, but consumers need to treat it as just that. They’re not a travel agent, which I falsely assumed they are. People may feel protected and secure buying their holiday through a huge firm that regularly advertises on television, but it relies on consumers to review their stay and that isn’t foolproof, as the reviews can be taken down by the owners, or, as in my case, the owner can simply take down the original advert and re-advertise under another name. For me it was never about getting a free holiday, just the holiday promised by the advert.”
• This article was amended on 21 October 2019 to remove potential ambiguity from the headline and to add details about the CMA announcement last month.
