Simulation for filtering manipulated evaluation texts
Fraud protection
HolidayCheck AG is on its way to becoming the largest travel seller in Europe. An important building block for this is the review platform including relevant and above all authentic travel and hotel reviews. The website of HolidayCheck is the largest opinion portal for travel and hotel reviews in the German-speaking world. HolidayCheck also has several international offshoots, some of which are market leaders ahead of TripAdvisor, the world's largest competitor. HolidayCheck has the best travel and hotel reviews. This user-generated content is the "engine" behind the business model. Users come to the website because of these genuine and uncensored reviews from travelers. This constant stream of new, relevant content also means that the website is ranked high on Google with many search hits. Ideally, visitors not only read and research the reviews, but also book directly via the online travel agency on the site.
The immense value of user-generated content
The quality of these hotel reviews by the users / the community is therefore the basis for the business model. Conversely, inferior or even fake hotel reviews are extremely harmful.
Holiday Check website
Content Quality Assurance
The HolidayCheck AG therefore puts a great deal of effort into filtering the hotel reviews, which are received daily in such a considerable volume (approx. 1,500+ per day) that a purely human review is impossible. HolidayCheck therefore relies on a combination of an automatic check and a check by a large content team (40+ people) of trained staff.
Identifying false or fraudulent reviews
In an initial long-term project from October 2013 to June 2015, Tojio GmbH gradually helped to improve both the automatic review system and the human review process. Various types of reviews, ranging from low-quality to intelligently falsified, were regularly submitted via the HolidayCheck website. The origin of the submission was disguised or anonymized using various technical procedures. During the test period, all tests were logged, optimized and modified to enable the broadest possible simulation. The findings have continuously contributed to improving the system and training the content team.
Awards for website and fraud security
The HolidayCheck website regularly receives awards, e.g. as the best travel website of the year. The website has also performed relatively well in fraud security tests, e.g. by Stiftung Warentest.
So far, no case of mass falsification of serious reviews has been reported, although there are so-called guerrilla marketing agencies that claim the opposite.