Commercial Travel blogging - an offence in the EU

A recent blog on Travel Mole outlines the interesting consequence of misuse of Web 2.0 by commercial tourism operators trying to buy favour with consumers by fake postings to sites such as Trip Advisor.  

Commercial blogging - ‘flogging’ - becomes an offence in Europe – March 28 2008 by Dinah Hatch 

“The end, it seems, could be nigh for those cheeky hoteliers who pretend to be customers on TripAdvisor and write themselves glowing reviews. As of April 6, Brussels will be banning such underhand activities as the EU’s Unfair Commercial Practices Directive comes into force, making commercial blogging, or flogging as it’s known, an offence.

The new law includes two categories of unfair commercial practice - misleading practices and aggressive practices. Whether a practice is deemed unfair will be judged in light of the effect it has on the average consumer’s consequent decision to purchase. The law means companies, no matter how small (and that includes sole traders), will not be able to post online themselves or pay anyone else to post reviews or blogs about their own companies that are misleading.

The law comes into force at a time when the public are beginning to make their disapproval about flogging heard.In the US, the recent Travel 2.0 Consumer Technology Survey which was commissioned by Phocuswright revealed that when travel purchasing decisions are being made, most Americans said they would rather make their own minds up than follow the views of people they didn’t know (and therefore, by implication, could not trust). “ 

My initial thoughts are

1) How are they going to police and track it – that will be interesting to see

2) Once they work that out people will find a way to get around it

3) Trip Advisor is a commercial site – you have to take it on face value and understand that (apologies to the Americans and anyone else who didn’t see the mass advertising that dominates the site)

More importantly, it gives support to the notion that non-commercial social networking sites where people build relationships and communities of “trust” may have greater impact on people’s purchasing decisions.  This is something I am interested in and one of the reasons I have chosen the Travelzine as my learning community to study. 

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