How the mind of the compulsive TripAdvisor reviewer works

Gianluca Moreschi, 56, posted 800 reviews in one year

by Cinzia Alfè – 3 January 2017 – disagreement

A mania, a necessity, an obsession. The same impelling impulse that drives our hand to take up our smartphone every two seconds to take a quick look at our favorite social network or the latest news from our tribe of virtual friends.

But for Gianluca Moreschi, this is not the unstoppable impulse, he is concerned with writing reviews in industrial quantities on TripAdvisor.

Eight hundred, in fact, were the reviews you have posted in the last twelve months, with a daily average of about two reviews per day. His is a fixed appointment, inescapable, a daily ritual distant from the mood of the occasional reviewer, and which instead embraces the sphere of real work or irrepressible pleasure.

Moreschi – who works as a scientific rep for drugs, an activity that allows him to travel around Italy – feels a rare satisfaction, bordering on pathological, in reviewing everything that comes his way: restaurants, shops, archaeological sites, everything becomes precious material to let the compulsive reviewer's fingers fly over the keyboard and post his opinions on TripAdvisor, so much so that the site has awarded him as one of the top eight winners of the TripAdvisor Community Awards.

The abnegation is in fact undeniable, Moreschi gets to plan his holidays according to what he intends to review and organizing the activity with scrupulous precision.

“I cross-reference the data from TripAdvisor and other guides with my own – Moreschi tells Corriere – in the end I put down a list of places I have to see. For now, there are a hundred”. And on weekends, our passes to action: “I eat and review. On other occasions, I shut myself up at home and finish the job”

A fine work, that of Moreschi, who has found a way to taste the dishes of the "starred" restaurants without having to bear the prohibitive costs that the type and volume of these reviews could require. He goes there during the day, during the lunch break: “Three courses can be enjoyed for 60 euros. In the evening, you would pay triple”.

But it's not just the restaurants that capture Moreschi's attention: even monuments and localities don't escape his ardor as a reviewer.

“In Italy there are beautiful military cemeteries; near Udine I found one surrounded by shopping malls: chilling. I immediately posted the disappointment”. Or, Moreschi remembers, “I was recently in Como; for work I accidentally noticed a small building where a cardinal once lived. Now there is a very good quality restaurant. I went in and did the review”.

In short, a precious element for TripAdvisor, whose community of reviewers, we recall, is represented by 120 million users who post an average of 280 reviews per minute.

And many of these come from Gianluca Moreschi.