Trust, reviews, and consumer empowerment

Trust in digital tourism has shifted away to the interpersonal sources as well as the institutional trust to the form of peer-based rating and the algorithmic review-based trust of sites like Airbnb and TripAdvisor. This chapter also addresses the processes by which digital trust can be generated, gamed, and mutated within tourism platforms, specifically analysing how consumer decision-making is impacted by user reviews, rating systems, and algorithmic governance. Based on articles on multidisciplinary literature, it addresses ethical issues of fake reviews, tactical intervention, data integrity, and equity in algorithms. This chapter explores the ability of platform interventions to maintain trust through the case study of Airbnb: verified reviews, AI-human moderation, and trust equity measures. This chapter further provides a summary of viable stakeholder suggestions and recommendations for future research studies in the achievement of ethical, inclusive, and transparent trust systems in platform tourism. It provides a call to action, a guide to sustainable trust governance in the platform economy, by bringing interdisciplinary scrutiny of law, communication studies, information systems, and ethics to bear in this quest.