The AI travel scam hiding in plain sight

Kishore Bitra thought he’d found the perfect hotel in Hershey, Pennsylvania. The detailed customer reviews praised the property's "upscale" amenities and "attentive" service. But when Bitra checked into his room, he found something entirely different: a broken air conditioner, dirty sheets, and a property in a state of disrepair.

Then he took a closer look at the user comments and noticed that they were all posted the same week. To the average guest, that might not seem strange. But to Bitra, an engineer who works for the city of Baltimore, it raised a red flag.

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"These aren't real people," he concluded. "They're AI agents managed by reputation management firms."

More than 20% of luxury hotel reviews were AI-generated in 2025, according to Originality.ai, a content verification tool that detects AI-generated text. That's double the rate in 2022. And the fakes skew flattering: 57% of them carried five stars. A recent survey by WalletHub shows that 83% of Americans are concerned about being manipulated by AI.

Original source: https://www.usatoday.com/travel/