Tripadvisor

Is Tripadvisor safe?

Yes, for reading reviews and booking a tour or hotel: Tripadvisor has no reported breach of user accounts, pays outside researchers to find security bugs, and publishes more detail about its fight against fake reviews than any other travel site we score. The weaker side is data. Its privacy policy gives it room to sell and share personal data for advertising, including with data aggregators. We score Tripadvisor 59/100.

The restaurant-booking app TheFork is a Tripadvisor brand with its own page and score. Tripadvisor signed an agreement on 2 August 2026 to sell it to American Express, and the sale is still waiting for antitrust clearance in Europe.

How many reviews are fake?

Tripadvisor's 2025 Review Transparency Report, covering 2024, gives the clearest numbers available. The community submitted 31.1 million reviews from 21 million members on 30 million devices. Tripadvisor says it blocked or removed 2.7 million of them as fraudulent, about 8.7%. It also removed more than 214,000 reviews that it believed were written by AI, across 101,411 properties in 189 countries. AI-written reviews are banned outright.

The fraud takes familiar forms. Owners or staff post glowing reviews of their own business ("boosting"), rivals post damaging ones ("vandalism"), and some businesses pay firms to do it for them. Incentives are a newer focus: Tripadvisor removed more than 360,000 reviews that seemed to come from employee reward schemes, and in 2023 warned more than 9,000 businesses about rewarding guests for reviews. It also removed 814 reviews linked to blackmail threats against businesses.

Every review passes automated checks, then human moderators and community reports. That is strong, but no filter is perfect, and the report cannot say how many fakes it missed. Businesses have also found indirect ways to game the system. In 2018 Australia's Federal Court ordered the Meriton hotel group to pay A$3 million after the ACCC showed it had masked guests' email addresses so that people likely to complain never got Tripadvisor's review invitation. The court's finding was against Meriton, not Tripadvisor.

What the app shares with advertisers

Apple's label lists device ID, advertising data, other usage data and crash data as used to track you across other companies' apps and websites. Linked to you for Tripadvisor's own marketing, analytics and personalisation is a much longer list, including precise location, contact details, your contacts, photos and videos, search and browsing history.

Google Play says the app shares name, email, user IDs, address and phone number with other companies for advertising or marketing, and approximate location for analytics and advertising.

The US privacy policy, last updated in July 2025, is frank about it. Tripadvisor may "sell" or "share", as US state laws define those words, personal data with business partners, social networks, ad networks and data aggregators for interest-based advertising. When you log in or use the app, it may pass a hashed version of your email, your mobile advertising ID and your IP address to LiveRamp and The Trade Desk, which use them to recognise you across the web. You can opt out through the "Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information" link, and the policy says it honours browser signals such as Global Privacy Control.

Security and the regulatory record

We found no reported breach of Tripadvisor accounts. Tripadvisor has run a paid bug bounty on Bugcrowd since January 2019, and its old HackerOne page now points researchers there. Its public material says little about account protection such as two-factorTwo-factor authenticationSigning in with a second proof of identity on top of your password, such as a code from an app, a security key or a passkey.More in the glossary login, which keeps the security score below that of Skyscanner.

The regulatory record is clean for the last decade. The one fine we found is from December 2014, when Italy's AGCM fined Tripadvisor €500,000 for failing to adopt controls against false reviews while describing its content as authentic and gave it 90 days to fix the problem. In July 2015 Rome's regional administrative court annulled the fine, noting among other things that no consumer had complained. The authority appealed, and on 15 July 2019 the Consiglio di Stato, Italy's top administrative court, found the practice unfair after all. Read together, the court said, Tripadvisor's claims could lead an average internet user to believe the reviews were reliable and genuine, although the company knew the limits of its checks on where reviews came from; its disclaimer was not shown up front but sat in a separate section of the site. The disclaimers did soften the harm, so the court cut the fine to €100,000. The case dates from 2014, more than 10 years ago, so it does not lower today's score. In September 2019 Tripadvisor was among 25 firms that signed up to the UK Competition and Markets Authority's principles for booking sites, which bar fake scarcity claims and require the full price up front. Those principles are voluntary rather than the result of a review of Tripadvisor itself, and we found no finished regulator review of the app in the last 10 years, so the record scores 85 rather than the 90 or more we give apps that a regulator has finished examining.

How to use Tripadvisor more safely

1. Sort reviews by date and read the recent, detailed ones; a cluster of short five-star reviews posted in a few days is a warning sign.
2. Look at traveller photos, not just the business's own.
3. Use the "Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information" link in the app if you live in the US, and refuse tracking on your iPhone.
4. Give the app location access only while you use it.
5. When a hotel price sends you to a partner site, check the final price and who you are paying before you enter card details.

How we scored it

Privacy (40) is the weakest factor, because the policy allows data sales to ad networks and data aggregators and the app shares contact details for advertising. Regulatory record (85) is the strongest, with no fine in the last 10 years. Scams and harmful content (60) reflect a large user-review platform with strong, well-documented moderation that still sees millions of fake attempts a year. GetYourGuide scores 61 and Booking.com 47.