Strategic Aviation
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Meriton 'misled and deceived' by blocking customers' bad reviews: court - Sydney Morning Herald
When the major accommodation provider suspected many of its guests would write bad reviews on TripAdvisor, Meriton's staff stopped their customers' email addresses from being shared with the popular travel review website.
In the first case of its kind, the Federal Court has found Meriton "engaged in misleading or deceptive conduct" between November 2014 and October 2015 by supplying incorrect contact details for guests to the review site, or by withholding them.
"This was a deliberate and systematic process of masking or blocking email addresses from TripAdvisor in order to stop TripAdvisor being able to contact those guests and ask them for reviews," ACCC Commissioner Sarah Court told Fairfax Media on Friday.
"The judge also said that if you look at the scale and frequency of this practice ... the effect it had was substantial."
The judgment also referred to internal emails which, in one case, showed staff had asked a guest to remove a one-star rating from TripAdvisor in return for a full refund.
Ms Court said the ACCC had dealt with smaller companies posting fake or misleading online reviews, but the Meriton case was the first of its kind dealing with a major operator.