TripAdvisor’s response

Jun 6, 2019 — We greatly value the feedback we have received from the Change.org petitioners and are grateful for their interest in travel safety and input on how to make TripAdvisor an even better information platform for travelers.

As the world’s largest information platform for travelers, we feel it is our responsibility to ensure our community has access to important safety information that empowers them to keep traveling.

We embrace our responsibility and are deeply committed to making traveler safety a company priority for the long term. We continue to evolve and enhance our platform, having recently introduced a number of new safety features and policies, and will continue to introduce new enhancements in the future.

You can read more about the approach we are taking in a message from Lindsay Nelson, TripAdvisor’s president of core experience here: https://bit.ly/2WpfJyJ

For more than a decade, TripAdvisor has enabled sexual assault survivors to anonymously tell their stories, which have in turn served as warnings to millions of travelers across the globe. After speaking with “K” (the author of this Change.org petition) and other survivors of sexual assault over the past few months, we realized that travelers might need more guidance on how to set up an anonymous account to courageously share their first-hand review about a safety incident. We now provide these tips on our platform: https://bit.ly/2WtJZZm

While for years travelers have been able to post their anonymous reviews, we heard loud and clear that we needed to do a better job of surfacing reviews that include safety concerns and incidents of assaults so they are easier to find.

This led to the introduction of a number of enhanced features dedicated to traveler safety on TripAdvisor.

First, in 2017, TripAdvisor launched a feature to notify travelers about potential traveler safety issues at specific properties reported by the media. These notifications appear on a property’s listing page on TripAdvisor in cases where there are no readily accessible first-hand reviews describing the issues concerned.

A single business listing on TripAdvisor can often contain hundreds or thousands of reviews posted by travelers. Most recently, we introduced a safety review filter to make it easier for travelers to quickly find relevant safety information at a particular property.

Reviews that contain information about a safety-related incident at a property will also be marked with a notice at the top of the review. When travelers are scrolling through reviews of a property, this notification feature will make it easier to spot which reviews contain safety information.

We have also partnered with sexual assault advocacy organizations, such as No More, to provide guidance as we develop solutions. For example, No More is providing training to our content moderation and customer service leadership about how to better support survivors of sexual assault.

We assure you that these enhancements to our product, training and policies are just the beginning. Our goal is to empower all travelers with relevant information that keeps them traveling including adding helpful travel safety tips about businesses and neighborhoods.

We know more work still needs to be done to ensure travelers have the information they need to stay safe. TripAdvisor will continue to work with, and gather feedback from, our community and the tourism industry as we make future investments to ensure the safety of our users.