Shocking TripAdvisor T&Cs
Yesterday cobooking become aware that tripadvisor had changed their terms and conditions. Our view is they are asking properties to agree to outrageous terms and conditions.
TripAdvisor SHOCKING terms … Our one line interpretation: You agree they can take images and text from your website which they have perpetual, royalty-free, irrevocable, transferable and sublicensable rights to !!!! What !!!
Read on to get more detail along with the actual terms from their page yesterday, tell us what you think ?
Under the title “Property and room level content agreement”
- You authorise TripAdvisor to access your website at anytime.
- They can collect any images and text from your website, they call these “Materials”
- You then have to agree to give TripAdvisor the following:
Royalty free: They will not pay you for any of the material they take off your website.
Perpetual: They have the materials forever to the end of time.
Transferable: They can give the rights to the material to someone else
Irrevocable: You cannot ever change it once they have the material
Sublicensable: They can sell your website materials to someone else
This is the most shocking overreach I have personally ever seen. Which lawyer, who in TripAdvisor thinks that they can take your images and your text and your logo have those rights to them ?
TripAdvisor must reverse this immediately, anyone that has agreed it must have done so by mistake or felt compelled or coerced to do it. They must have felt they had no choice… No reasonable business would ever sign over rights to all their property descriptions and photos logos and marks in such a way.
These terms show that there can be no trust in this corporation. How can a company that offers terms like this in this way ever be trusted ?
TripAdvisor have recently started to offer paid for management services. They offer to manage all your reviews, to help you gather reviews from your guests. These kind of software services require you to trust the company with your customer details and other commercially sensitive data.
Get real TripAdvisor who do you think you are ? Do you trust TripAdvisor with your business after they have pulled this trick ? Take a quick survey and let us know…..
The image below show what was displayed to some properties in the UK yesterday 25 Feb 2021
