Kenneth Seaton, owner of the Grand Resort Hotel and Convention Center in Pigeon Forge, Tenn., was denied his $10 million suit against TripAdvisor Inc. for defamation in an appeals court.
The Tennessee hotel was dubbed "America's dirtiest" in 2011 by the popular travel website, which Seaton claims irreparably damaged his hotel's reputation.
The U.S. district court judge ruled against Seaton last September, citing that the user reviews on TripAdvisor's website do not fit the definition of defamation. This ruling was reinforced by a judge in the court of appeals in Cincinnati.
In her opinion, Justice Karen Nelson Moore stated that "Seaton failed to state a plausible claim for defamation because TripAdvisor's '2011 Dirtiest Hotels' list cannot reasonably be interpreted as stating, as an assertion of fact, that Grand Resort is the dirtiest hotel in America." She cited the title as a "rhetorical hyperbole" and that TripAdvisor did not intend to "seriously maintain that Grand Resort is, in fact, the dirtiest hotel in the U.S."
Interestingly, although 226 of the 321 reviews for Grand Resort on TripAdvisor rate the hotel as "terrible," four other hotels in the Pigeon Forge area ranked worse.
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