AN ANGRY hotelier is taking travel website TripAdvisor to court after an online review compared his hotel to a brothel.

Ken Robins, who owns Hotel Celebrity on Gervis Road, claims the review put his three young children at risk and led to several female members of his staff being propositioned by guests.

A reviewer with the username ‘Gemma B’ branded the 54-bedroom hotel ‘horrendous’ and said it was ‘seedy and filthy and like sleeping in a brothel’ adding: “All they needed was a red light!”

Now Ken, 65, is taking civil action against TripAdvisor for damages.

He said: “We live on site and the hotel is like an extension to our home but we had to ban our children from going there.

“To ensure their safety they had to be accompanied everywhere, their Facebook pages were taken down and their mobile phones changed. “Our business was family orientated and we had to cancel several children’s parties.

“Two weddings were cancelled on the basis of ‘no smoke without fire’.

“Several chambermaids were offered money for sex when they went into guests’ rooms.”

The furious father-of-three asked for the review, posted on August 24 last year, to be removed but claims he received no response.

He added: “I then made a formal complaint to the Advertising Standards Agency.

“I tried to post a response three times and each time the management review was not accepted. The review affected our profit margins by more than seven per cent.”

Ken said: “All TripAdvisor had to do was take the post off the site but it is still there today.

“I know of hotels which have been forced out of business by damaging reviews.

“For small hotels and B&Bs, who are particularly vulnerable, it can be devastating.”

Bournemouth reputation management firm KwikChex has already complained about TripAdvisor to the Advertising Standards Authority.

KwikChex’s operations director Gemma Byrne said: “It is understandable that the review could cause great distress. In our view the phraseology went beyond fair comment. In that regard we believe that it is actionable.”

A spokesman for TripAdvisor said they could not comment on possible litigation but added: “We take our responsibility as the world’s largest travel site extremely seriously and provide the platform and tools to aid our users’ decision making process: enormous scale and freshness of content (more than 40 contributions a minute on average), management responses, reviewer profiles, extremely effective fraud detection systems, as well as the ability to report inappropriate content.

“In addition to the value TripAdvisor reviews bring to travellers, we also understand the importance that the reviews and opinions on TripAdvisor have to properties and businesses listed on the site.”