Now TripAdvisor may not be 100% reliable? Say it ain't so...

Someone got to the Owl. ©

TripAdvisor.com, one of the world's most popular, successful and trusted travel advice sites, may not, it turns out, be offering only the independent comments of ordinary travellers.

According to news reports like this one from the UK's Telegraph newspaper, UK site Travolution has uncovered evidence of hotel owners being approached by marketing and advertising firms offering, for a fee, to seed favourable reviews of those hotels on the Trip Advisor site.

In its defense, Trip Advisor is aware of the problem, posting warnings above suspicious reviews and claiming to have screening processes in place to prevent widespread occurrence of the problem.

Still, as this article points out, isn't there a good chance the wrongdoers are ahead of the site and on to the next way to circumvent those procedures?

Anyway, interesting reading. Naive optimists that we are at the Underground, we were shocked...