yes I noticed something similar too. I'm a top reviewer there and was always able to send my unedited reviews. However, I then wrote a negative but very fair (and nothing exaggerating, name-calling, etc) review of a hotel in Cambodia. For the first time ever, it said my review was under review - and then a few days later came back with very weird excuses. One time it said I was accusing people of lying - huh?

The hotel had almost all 5-star reviews, and I stayed there as well as another high reviewed hotel in the same city. The one was clearly less nice of a hotel and that's the one I wrote the negative review about (actually I think it was a 2 or 3-star) - clearly the reviews are biased and getting people to stay at a less-than-par hotel.

I think on my 3rd or 4th submission it was finally accepted (I insisted in getting my review in there). I took out anything that was even moderately negative and tried to reword things so that readers could read between the lines that it was worse.

This convinced me that clearly some hotels have a relationship with TA but I don't know the details. Either they pay them to excessively scrutinize any negative review, or they let them control their own reviews / etc.

This is very disappointing - I've contributed and relied on TA for several years, and now I have to doubt what's real on there.