Many internet users know them: fake reviews. A supposedly great product is rated particularly well or incomprehensibly bad. Nevertheless, these play an important role when booking hotels or purchasing products. HolidayCheck has now won a victory in court against a globally active provider of fake reviews.

Hotels that have no reviews at all on booking portals are booked less often than those that have many reviews. Unfortunately, some providers use so-called fake reviews to supposedly make themselves look better. Or what else there is: The competition is deliberately maligned using fake reviews.

Can you trust the reviews? Since there is so much nonsense going on with this, you should be careful. An indication that something might be wrong: a hotel has almost exclusively positive reviews and some of them describe things that don't even exist in the hotel. Then the alarm bells should ring, because even a top hotel with which almost all travelers are satisfied sometimes has a guest who simply didn't like anything. The probability that negative reviews will be written is much higher than that people for whom everything was right will take the time to write positive reviews.

But you should also be careful if there are a lot of negative reviews. It could be that a special agency has been hired against the hotel, because the more negative the “reviews”, the lower the booking numbers. It could be that the competition simply doesn't grant anything.

HolidayCheck won the court case against Goldstar Marketing and obtained an enforceable order for injunctive relief, damages, information and reimbursement of costs. The case concerned the anti-competitive behavior of the company and the backer of Goldstar Marketing, which sells fake reviews of products and services.

The company, based in Cyprus but operating worldwide, is probably one of the largest sellers of fake reviews in the world. The judgment obtained states that a re-publication of fake reviews on HolidayCheck by Goldstar Marketing can now be punished by the court with fines or imprisonment. The company must also ensure that the relevant fake reviews are deleted and HolidayCheck must provide information about who the fake reviews came from. HolidayCheck will regularly check the actual omission. HolidayCheck had already achieved an important success before the Munich Regional Court in 2019 when the court classified fake reviews as illegal.

Christoph Ludmann, CEO of HolidayCheck says: “After the decisive judgment in 2019, this second judgment is another important milestone on the way to more transparency in reviews and it shows that we are on the right track in our approach against fake reviews. We hope that the civil law means will be sufficient for us to enforce the title. It has been shown in the past that a successful process does not mean that the fake agencies will stop doing business. At the same time, we will continue to advocate for clear political and legal framework conditions in the future and will continue to intensively pursue our strict testing measures.”