The Unethical Practice of Hotel Review Ghost-Writers

Business ethics is a field of applied ethics that examines ethical issues that arise in a business environment. Business ethics includes five kinds of activities. The most dominant activity is the analysis of immorality incidents in business. The second type entails the empirical study of business practices while the third type consists of clarifying basic terms and revealing ethical business issues. The forth kind of activity concerns meta-ethical questions and a review of ethics theory. Finally, the fifth kind aims at the resolution of embedded problems. Ethics is a key issue for many industries, including the tourist industry. One of the key issues that has emerged during the past years, is ghost-writing in the tourism sector. Ghost-writer are those who are hired to author books, manuscripts, screenplays, speeches, articles, blog posts, stories, reports, whitepapers, or other texts, officially credited to another person. Celebrities, executives, participants in news stories, and political leaders, often hire ghost-writers to draft or edit autobiographies, memoirs, magazine articles, or other written material. In music, ghost-writers are often employed to write songs, lyrics and instrumental pieces. Screenplay authors can also use ghost-writers to either edit or rewrite their scripts and improve them. In tourism, ghost-writers employed by hotels for two reasons. The first one is to write a positive review for the hotel and post it on social media, mostly on tripadvisor and similar platform. The second, and arguably worse, case is to write a negative review for a competitor. Both cases are considered unethical, though the latter constitutes a very harmful misconduct. The emergence of ghost-writers has alarmed not only the sector but also social media platform providers. For this reason, some measures have been taken. For example, booking.​com requires that reviewers have actually booked a room and that the booking process done through their website. There are having been many cases of ghost-writing, which have undermined the value of TripAdvisor and of other web sites. In some cases, the website has been forced to publicly apologise to their customer or the businesses affected from this kind of malpractice. Overall, this is practice which has not been extensively researched and merits further research.