Well, at least the stupidity makes it easy on us sometimes. I wouldn't be too happy if I'd paid for that review.

I like the concept of TA and want to see it succeed. Not sure why they would be so hesitant to clean up their act. Maybe they're simply outmanned when you consider how many venues worldwide are getting reported on every day.

I love the concept of TA and have high hopes for their continued success. You are probably correct that they are outmanned and then paranoia about bogus reviews leads to the censorship. It is also causes them to rely too much on volunteers with no supervision.

I agree that the duplicate for a similar hotel makes it particularly dubious, but I'd find this type of review useless anyway, and go on to the next one. Vague superlatives, no concrete examples (what does "wonderful" hotel facilities mean? the pool? the spa? the fitness center? the lobby decorations? the flowers at the entrance?), features I may or may not get (view, fruit basket, free food).

And an "oof garden" sounds positively painful.:D

I have on a number of occasions had the experience of thinking I'd successfully uploaded photos but then finding a few days later, when I returned to the site to check whether the photos had been approved, that some of the photos were not there. In some cases, I have just re-uploaded them, successfully on the second go around (thinking maybe whoever was doing photo approvals may have been off-duty when I re-uploaded).

There was at least one case that was clearly censorship (although understandable and not a big deal), in which I tried posting a photo several times and it never was approved, although other photos in the lot were approved. That photo showed a funny mistranslation from French to English: "Checkout time is 11:00 p.m.[sic] noon. Please contact should you wish to checkout at a later time." I can see that TA might feel this photo added no value to the description of the hotel. However, I think the photo gives a prospective hotel guest a few hints about the hotel staff's level of English fluency and of their attentiveness to small details. For many travelers, this kind of detail is really very minor and perhaps not helpful at all, but for others it could be, when taken with all the other information available about the hotel, somewhat useful.


As for the case with the pizzaiolo you describe --
I too have been annoyed that TA does not make it easy to attach a photo to review after the fact. But you can upload photos without writing a review, so when I want to upload photos after I have already posted a review, I will upload the photos in association with that particular property, even if the photos are not directly associated with my earlier review.

Aloha, I’m hoping someone on this forum can help me around an unfortunate and uncalled for situation. My account at TripAdvisor (TA) was disabled without warning over two months ago, just five reviews short of obtaining Top Contributor status, their highest tier. I assume the cause was my posting a message asking for TA’s policy regarding Cyber-Bullying after being victimized on their forums (with insults and censorship). Since I received no replies to my inquiries, I have no idea how to appeal. I suppose I could copy each of my contributions and publish them on another site such as Google Plus, saying good riddance to TA. It just doesn’t seem fair that TA continues to use my content (45 reviews, 56 helpful votes, and over 19,000 readers) while I have no access to my account to remove them. It also seems unfair to both the establishments and readers if I delete my reviews because of TA's intolerance for free discussion. Any advice is appreciated.

outpaddling

Thanks for attempting to assist me. The link you pasted does not allow me to send an email. It first requires that I sign in and then says my account is disabled. TA is not responsive to general emails sent to headquarters and specific emails require an active account. A Catch 22.

Can anyone else offer suggestions?

Create a new account, sign in, and THEN contact TA explaining the situation?

It is a violation of TA policy to have more than one member account and the accounts can be closed for this reason. Please understand that I have no wish to create yet another reason for censorship. Of course, TA policy is clear that they can silence members for any reason or no reason at all. Again, I'd appreciate other ideas for dealing with this problem and the inherent unfairness.

I have always found Tripadvisor pretty useful and not really seen many fake reviews or ones that I thought were fake. This past week however I was looking up Reviews of the Radisson Newport Beach and there was like several reviews in a row that mentioned how good the restaurant was and they were all first time reviewers. Very suspicious to me. I then get to the hotel and was going to try the restaurant to see if it was really that good......I didnt even bother as it looked very boring and unpleasant. In my review of the property I put that I though the other reviews were suspicious....we will see if it gets edited out.

I just took a look at that property and you are definitely correct, IMO. Absolutely ridiculous number of nearly identical fake reviews. I would think the chain itself would police their reviews and be embarrassed by this.

I'm very close to writing an 'Emperor's New Clothes' type of review for a rogue tour operator, also. I suspect it won't last long either.

I agree completely that the many recent reviews of Radisson Newport Beach are all fraudulent. If you post your suspicions on a TA destination forum or support forum, you will most likely be attacked by the volunteer "experts" before having your post removed. Also, in my experience, marking the fraudulent reviews as suspicious does absolutely nothing. Speaking of the Emperor's New Clothes, why does TA censor the naked truth while insisting their reviews are trustworthy?

I'm not sure I agree with that. Every time I've taken the time to mark a review as suspicious it's eventually disappeared, even if it took a little time. I read yesterday that there are something like 50 million entries in their database. I don't believe they possibly have the manpower to stay on top of the fraud, but they could do it with a technical solution. I read that there are heuristic algorithms that can identify 90% of fraudulent posts. They desperately need to introduce such technology and censor first, rather than throwing suspicious reviews out there and subjecting everything to the scream test.

My experience marking reviews as suspicious is for just a single hotel, and they are far more clever with their bogus reviews and fictional reviewers. Perhaps TA uses an algorithm to deal with reported abuse and my reports fall outside its parameters. As you suggest, there are too many reviews and they can't handle abuse using people-power.

I wish there was some formula where we could rate the reviews, with the ratings of the better reviewers being given more weight. Likewise, I wish we could comment on reviews, much as Amazon allows comments on book and product reviews.

I get really irritated when some idiot (usually American) blasts a budget European hotel because the front desk clerk doesn't speak perfect English, for example. There are other things of the same nature that I would love to comment on.

Once I saw a rather intense confrontation between a guest and the front desk at a Paris hotel. That review soon made Trip Advisor. If the reviews had allowed comments I could have made some points on behalf of both the hotel and the guest that would have made the review far more helpful than the rant that it was.

But it is what it is. I ignore the reviews from people who don't have a reasonable number of posts and those from people who make a big deal about "kettles."