The Original Austin Ghost Tour on KXAN
https://www.kxan.com/things-to-do/where-are-austins-most-haunted-sites-local-ghost-tour-uncovers-city-history/
This is a story about our local ghost tour business in Austin. We like all the local fun ghost tours around the country have been wondering about the integrity of the once respected TripAdvisor. According to this article it has now turned into an unrecognizable platform for corruption. In this article I discovered the national ghost tour business started by Lance Zaal called US Ghost adventures has jumped on board of the corruption.
Apparently, according to the Annapolis tour, the game is to pretend to be the local business because the local business is real, has real reviews and top SEO because of this. Lance Zaal gets paid through TripAdvisor with no accountability or refunds or questions asked when the customer is obviously disappointed. Hiring people to constantly write fake 5-star reviews to counter the real reviews alerting others to the scam. TripAdvisor knows this but they are making money.
I just found this article about Lance Zaal and US Ghost Adventures. The article about Lance Zall includes a lawsuit filed by a local business in North Carolina. It is written by a local business in Annapolis.
Local Ghost Tours fighting back against Natl. US Ghost Adventures
Since their inception, US Ghost Adventures (USGA), and its apparently ethically-challenged owner Lance Zaal, have allegedly made it a standard business practice to violate and infringe small, locally-owned Ghost Tour companies’ trademarks in order to create confusion among potential customers looking for the best local ghost tours. Accusations against USGA include actions such as creating local DBA’s (doing business as) which are similar to the successful local company’s names, as well as labeling their activities with the same names as the aforementioned companies’ trademarked names or legally registered DBA’s. Further, they are accused of deceptive business practices beyond just the trademark infringements, such as claiming local company’s pre-existing Google Business pages as their own, and in the case of at least one company, 20 years of customer reviews son comments. Additionally, there is direct recorded proof of the company willfully redirecting USGA’s negative customer reviews to the Google reviews pages of their competitors, while directing all positive reviews to their own Google reviews page. Besides USGA, Lance Zaal and his company also own and operate several historic “haunted” houses as B&B’s, including the Lizzie Borden House in Fall River, MA, Villisca Axe Murder House in Villisca, IA, and The Welty House in Gettysburg, PA. It only follows that yet again, USGA is being called to task and into multiple Federal courtrooms across America to answer for their actions as the Defendants in several jurisdictions in which small, local companies are filing lawsuits against them. Purportedly, Lance Zaal has stated that it is his goal to either drive the local company out of business, or force them to hire costly Patent & Trademark attorneys to bring expensive litigation against USGA. And, then settling the matter by grudgingly removing any offending violation before the matter can adjudicated and a ruling against USGA. But, not before forcing the small local businesses to dole out upwards of $10K to force the matter into court. Money which is hard to come by for a small company with limited revenue and resources to fight a corporate behemoth like USGA. Here are just two pending cases, certainly many more will be following:
