I do find that many guests can be passive aggressive. They find something wrong, don't bring it up or mention it to staff, and then go out and write negative reviews.

Many times I have issues, a call to front desk gets it resolved. Even on severe cases, like bed bugs, the hotel staff was very apologetic, jumped hoops, follow up emails, bonus points, apology letters, etc. I judges that hotel from management's response.

The Iapp is a bit confusing too.. I would pull up reviews more often, but the use of the app is unreliable.

Perhaps, Trip Advisor can improve the ease of use of the App. I don't want to spend 20 minutes navigating, when I can google and get all the review indications I want in an instant.

The New York Times had an article about Trip Advisor today:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/14/bu...l?ref=business

The best thing Trip Advisor COULD do (and which would make me using the App like a gazillion times more often) would be an "offline mode" for the app, where I could download reviews about restaurants (or hotels, or sight seeing stuff, anything I define) from a certain city/area to my mobile, and then use them offline. I know there are (theoretically) ways to download and use offline all restaurants from place X into my browser from the TA website, but it's complicated and especially the reviews couldn't be properly displayed..

If the app had the function to do this, including maybe even pictures and reviews, then I could REALLY use TA "on the go".. right now, I do need internet to use it, and unless I bought a local SIM, or found a Wifi, I won't have it. What do you think of this?

Report this to TA. They will have visibility on this since he contacted you through their messaging system.

Personally, I think if it downloads on Internet and saves a few pages I'm ok. Using up valuable memory on my phone to download reviews I might use say once every 2 or 3 years is a bit out there. Especially with restaurants, if I have a feel its a good restaurant, then I'm there. I'm not needing to review restaurants everytime I'm going for lunch or supper.

Lots of review at work, and at home.. something easier to work with would be nice.

But hey, if they can have an option to evaluate offline.. why not? Just because it might not work for me, that doesn't mean they shouldn't do it.

. . . . .

The attractions section of TA is the worst! I’ve given up on trying to use TA to figure out the “Can’t Miss” attractions while planning vacations as the good stuff is always buried under Segway tours, bus tours, and pirate ship excursions.

I’m also disturbed at the cover-up of crime that goes on in both the forums and reviews. On a few occasions after reading a news article about a crime committed against tourists I’ve tried to get perspective from people who were there at the same time only to find multiple closed threads on TA about the incident.

So my question is, if they have enough employees monitoring forums to quickly shut down any threads that speak negatively of a location, why can they not seem to find the time to correct inaccuracies in hotel or restaurant listings or weed out fake reviews?

That being said, I’m a senior contributor on TA, with hundreds of forum posts and almost all my reviews are positive because TA has never steered me wrong. I give back to the community, hanging out on the forum after returning from vacation in order to pay it forward. In picking a hotel:

1) I start off in the forums rather than the reviews, searching on specific criteria: “hotel with snorkelling off the beach,” “best hotel for kids” “close to DC attractions.” Because the best hotel for one person may not be the best hotel for me. Another reason why overall rankings are useless.
2) Then I move to the review section and read the last 20 reviews for my list of maybe 4-7 hotels, noting number of the reviews of each reviewer, especially if it’s 1 or 5 circles. I note comments that appear in multiple reviews. I note comments that are polar opposites (“Loved Fred the bartender!” “Rudest bartender ever!”) and try to put them in the context of the entire review and the reviewer themselves.
3) Check the photographs posted by reviewers
4) Do a wider Internet search. Some countries / cities have their own local forums. Bloggers. Google images. Love, love, love Oyster.com for unbiased reviews that are much more detailed than anything you’ll find in a guidebook, accompanied by unbiased photos. I would use it before TA except for my often quirky initial search criteria
5) Check various travel sites to compare prices on what is probably now a short list of 2-3 hotels
6) Pull the trigger
7) Blitz search the forums and reviews for every helpful tip on my chosen hotel. Best section of hotel to request (I never request a specific room), a signature dish at the restaurant I have to try, how to catch the bus to downtown, which lifeguard tower the best snorkelling is in front of, do I need to bring my own Earl Grey for the room, where is the nearest grocery store, decent restaurants within walking distance, etc.
8) Check the forums and reviews in the weeks leading up to my vacation in case they suddenly close a pool or start renovating a section of the hotel which would require changing expectations, or making a room request away from the construction

I agree that this is a huge problem with TA. However, it is not the TA employees reading and removing these, it is the DE's and regular users, who are offended by people posting less than stellar things about their home or favorite destination. Some people want to view the world through rose colored glasses. They click on "report inappropriate content" on posts, which then flags TA employees to read and close threads.

I have also found (although rare) DE's who will post many things warning people about certain areas, and things not to do. I really appreciate those. One such forum, is the Hawaii BI forum. Those DE's tell it like it is, with no white washing. One of the worst for removing posts, is the Puerto Vallarta forum. Mention ANYTHING about crime, and it will be removed. When I questioned TA about it, they told me that because the posts do not affect 90% of travelers, it is not pertinent. My reply was that it would be pertinent if I was one of the 10% that it DID apply to. I would rather have a warning, than go into a place thinking it had no problems.

This won't make TA's cut, but describes how I feel about them
 

TA is almost completely useless in Nanning because:

-venues come and go, but you fail to keep up with the times
-smart restaurant owners game the system to their advantage (i.e. ratings are useless... though I get the fact that 5 stars in Nanning are equivalent to 2 stars in first tier cities)
-addresses are always insufficient

Gu Cheng Lu, Nanning, China

This is what TA lists (the name of a street, no phone number or anything in Chinese). If you can't do better than that, please do us all a favor and delete the establishment in question.

A recurring problem on the TA Anguilla board. It appears that somebody from the tourism board reports any post even remotely critical of or unflattering to the island and the posts automatically get deleted. People complain, then the entire thread is 86'd.

Just came back from Ohau and I'm glad we didn't do some of the "must do" activities. Instead, we went against the advice of the forum and rented a convertible. And it was great. Stopped by Giovanni's shrimp truck, looked at the menu, looked at the food, looked at how ridiculously long people were waiting for food and we hightailed it out of there.

Got to the beach at noon and there was plenty of chairs and umbrellas available. Got to Pearl Harbor and there was no line. Walked right up to the counter.

Went to Hanauma bay, saw the masses of people. Didn't feel like being nickled and dimed and went and found a nice, sandy, quiet beach with friendly locals.

*shrug*

From now on out I'll only use Trip Advisor for amusement purposes.

TA does not use moderators, at least not as the first level of control. They rely on the community to self police. After X number of people reporting a post, it automatically gets deleted without human intervention. All it takes is a few members ganging up via PM and your post can be gone in minutes. There is a way to complain and have a human look at it to be reopened, but it seems to be intentionally designed to make it difficult to figure out how to contact someone. I understand that there is a limit to how many times you can report posts in a particular time frame to prevent abuse, but it does not seem to help much.

Update:
I received an email from the Support Team on the 17th January apologising for the delay :D
They have now acted on my request - better late than never I guess!

There should be safeguards to prevent automatic deletion abuse. Its at the stage where its not commonly known to many users of TA.

With hotels I noticed, that its difficult to obtain consistent rave reviews. All of the hotel ratings seem to bunch up in the middle of the pack.

I'm in the "I read TA with a skeptical eye and it's never steered me wrong" boat. That said, I think there are some simple things they could do that would make the reviews more useful/helpful beyond some common-sense spam/fake review supervision:

1) Add a filter that would allow you to only show reviews by people with X or more total reviews.

2) Add something like Amazon has that brings up the most helpful/representative positive and most helpful/representative negative review side-by-side.

3) Do some text mining and highlight common themes. For example "Positive reviews note: excellent for families, prompt service, quiet. Negative reviews note: broken elevator, dirty, far from city center."

4) Again like Amazon, work to "verify" reviews. I'm currently on a 3 month trip in India and I've booked several hotels though Cleartrip or Agoda by clicking links on Tripadvisor.com and I think my subsequent reviews of these properties should be highlighted in some way since it can be verified that I in fact booked a room there.

Generally though, the Facebook integration will start to help as certain reviewers can be "automatically trusted" through the social graph. And I have to think that some kind of press item or expose will force their hand on the fake reviews.

Incidentally, the fake reviews "problem", if they were ever to get serious about it, would be a fascinating machine learning problem to put on a crowdsourcing site like Kaggle.com. I would love to get my hands on some of that data, and I know others would as well.

Yep. If they would simply add that one feature - allowing people to confirm by receipt that they actually stayed or ate at the venue in question - it would make a huge difference. I also think that any reviews from posters with less than say 5 reviews, shouldn't count towards the ratings. All you have to do is look at say the top 20 rated restaurants in London to see that the ratings are a farce. Why can't they see that?

If you make it more difficult to enter a review, your quantity of reviews is going to drop off. You are also more likely to get only the most passionate responses. The majority will be people on a mission to get revenge for a bad stay. You might have a few that really loved it and want to promote the business. The middle of the road people are going to be the "meh, too much hassle" group that just stops reviewing.

Amazon is easy since you order, pay and review on the same site - so they can easily link, and the computer can do it without need for human intervention. Since you can't really book on TA, you would have an extra step of scanning/faxing your receipt and someone actually verifying that it is not forged and the dates match. Much more labor intensive and costly - especially for a company that is only making revenue off of advertising vs. actually selling a product like Amazon.

Not sure that Facebook integration help either. I refuse to link my FB page to my TA or any other site I participate in for general recreation or amusement. It is also not difficult to set up a fake FB page, so the issues remain.

Well, there are some hotel review pages that DO frequently ask for receipts.

HolidayCheck is one of the bigger one's. It certainly helps to double-check with them about hotels, and with restaurant review pages (especially the "dominant local one") about food places.. TA is a good "generic" advisor, but never the only place I'm going to trust.. just the biggest/most known one..

I'm not prepared to share a receipt with TripAdvisor, nor to follow links from their site to book a hotel or flight, etc, sorry. I don't have a large number of reviews on TA, but I think that anyone reading my reviews would realise that they are genuine.

I'm sorry for anyone who might rely solely on TA. I might check it for, say, a restaurant in a city that I'm not too familiar with, but I wouldn't make a decision on dining there purely on reviews on the site.

I posted a rather critical review of a a western USA gun club "attraction" and it lasted less than 1 day before being yanked. It appears that anything involving firearms gets immediate scrutiny. There was nothing political (heck, I was there) in my review, it was just (deservedly) unflattering. So, I simply reworded it and gave the attraction an even worse rating. This time, it wasn't taken down. A similar thing happened with a 5-star hotel in Texas. In my experience, you may not be able to use certain words (eg, rat), but you can use words with comparable effect (eg, dirty). It's a favor to other travelers to do the best we can to steer them away from potential problems.

I have quite a few reviews on TA, plenty of badges and the like. I posted a rather scathing review of a restaurant, within five days I received a take down email from TA saying that my review did not meet one of 5 parameters. After doing some research I found that others had made less than kind reviews of that same restaurant and had their reviews removed. Seems if a business has a rating from TA(that they gave) that leaving them a bad review doesn't end well. I saw it as a challenge, instead of the 3-4 sentence review I had left the first time, I left a 5 paragraph review and addressed the alleged missed parameters. That review posted and is still there. Ha!

-Patrick

I don't think a lot of people are going to keep their receipts and if you add that step reviews will fall off in my mind.

-Patrick

First I've heard of the five parameters. Not sure what the parameters really are. Will have to review the next time I post on TA.

At least, your post remains after it meets the requirements. Personally, I think both positive and negative posts should be reviewed to meet requirements to remain active, if TA is striking negative posts.

Hi agree with you on this:

The attractions section of TA is the worst! I’ve given up on trying to use TA to figure out the “Can’t Miss” attractions while planning vacations as the good stuff is always buried under Segway tours, bus tours, and pirate ship excursions.

I think tripadvisor is a great resource for choosing hotels. I think I am able to weed through reviews that may be planted. The traveller pictures are a big plus. However I really have a problem with the activities section. You have a mish mash of random things to do, tour companies, tour guide companies and the like. Think better categorization should have been done.

For finding tour guides, I tend to favour tourhq.com, which allows you to research tour guides at the destination and even allows you to contact them directly. What I like is that there is no middle man, so no commission to be paid. The tour guide gets to keep the entire fees, so I feel I am giving back a bit to the local community that I am visiting.

Wish there was something like that for attractions and the like.

I just have to say how much I love this thread. Why? Because I know that if this thread was posted on TA it would have been taken down by now but we're still here on FlyerTalk. ^

Wendy Perrin Named TripAdvisor Travel Advocate
 

You are absolutely correct that this thread would not exist on the TripAdvisor site due to their censorship and unwillingness to allow member discussion of fraudulent reviews. Many members have tried, all have failed.


But, this just in:
Wendy Perrin Named TripAdvisor Travel Advocate
https://twitter.com/wendyperrin


"I am excited to join TripAdvisor because travelers are looking for the truth and TripAdvisor strives to get to the truth, via the collective intelligence of its unbeatable global community," said Wendy Perrin.

My take: Wendy Perrin is a highly respected journalist and long-time contributor to Conde Nast Traveler (CNT). CNT always strived to tell the truth as did Wendy. How long will she last in an organization with such a different approach to "truth"?

We just returned from Shanghai and I took a quick look at restaurant listings just for fun. The number one restaurant is a very high end "experience" restaurant that probably rates the rating. The second rated is a mediocre Italian restaurant that would not be listed in anyone's top 1000 restaurant. Really?? We are on very good terms with the hotel manger there and she had some choice words for how the Italian restaurant had essentially bullied its way to the top. She also said that everyone who does not get the service or treatment they believe they are entitled to threatens a bad TA report. Some of the bad reports are the most enjoyable to read, they are so picky and the issues are so irrelevant you cant believe they happened or that someone cared about it. I dont think you can believe anything on the site anymore.

Truth in travel... not from the masses... Do your own homework..

The Italian place is actually pretty decent, regardless of whether or not they gamed TA. Of course it's not one of the "best" restaurants in SH by Michelin standards, but when evaluating TA ratings, it's important to bear in mind that most reviewers don't routinely drop $500 on dinner (i.e. there is a value component).

As others have said, the numbers themselves aren't always very helpful, but the reviews can be.

Moondog, I definitely respect your opinon and have followed a lot of your advice that you have given on this forum. You would be a trusted advisor for my travels. Its nice to know that Goodfellas is decent. I definitely agree that there is a value component, and that was kind of my point. Its hard to see the continium when the ranking order swings from the michelin restaurant to fast food and everything in between. I should be more focused on the reviews perhaps, and not the rankings as you suggest. Occupational hazard I guess since Im in a data driven business environment, and the weighting methodology of ta drives me crazy. For me, unless I understand the profile of the reviewer and probably, more importantly, the correlation to my own preferences, there is lots of data but no real information

My take on review sites (and here to a certain extent) is that 80% of the reviews are bragging, 15% are complaining and the truth lies in the 5% left over. If you scan through the garbage, you can usually find the truth.

I agree that our only real option when using TA is to read many reviews discarding those that are obviously bogus or spiteful. My question is why so many reviews fall into our reject bin when TA supposedly has mechanisms in place to eliminate them. To quote TA "A team of quality assurance specialists investigates suspicious reviews which are flagged by our proprietary tools or the passionate TripAdvisor community of more than 50 million monthly visitors." - See more at: http://www.tnooz.com/article/tripadv....Ay4VKwWA.dpuf

Is it simply because the TA monthly visitor count will drop if all those suspicious reviews are removed from search engine indexing? As someone here said, it is a numbers game.

Gaming ta doesn't necessarily need to entail any sort of bogus review component. For example simply asking happy customers to give you a favorable rating as a matter of practice works wonders especially in a place like Shanghai where the vast majority of venue managers don't have a clue about ta. All of the top ten hotels in Shanghai, on the other hand, are well aware of it.

Ta controversy -- Blackmailing
 

This is a lead item on Drudge: Hotels-hostage-to-TripAdvisor-blackmailers. So everybody is gaming TA.

I have long determined that the best travel advice comes from this discussion board and not, say, TA. For those of you that don't wander over the to FT luxury hotels section occasionally, you'll get a kick out of this FT-is-trailer-park-trash-insult. The best travel advice, claims this poster, is from 'F1 races, charity balls, Oscars parties, investor conferences, New Year in St. Moritz, ...' and not FT.

THAT comment stung. So ... I'm looking to remodel my mobile home here in La Jolla. I'll add a bathroom maybe .... or get new wallpaper ....

PS -- Forgot to add that that we all all "virtual nobodies" here on FT.

Tripadvisor is so useless. Full of reviews from people who travel twice a year and have totally unrealistic expectations of hotels, airlines, restaurants. The dead giveaway is when they start their rumblings with "I'm an experienced traveler who takes at least 12 flights a year. Our most recent experience in ............"

Someone who travels once a month would be elite by most standards and should be pretty experienced and have some inkling of what they're talking about... considering that TA is for a broad audience, what's the point of dismissing reviews written by people who are experienced travellers but not necessarily MMers?

FWIW, I find TA to be most useful for assessing hotels that aren't part of a chain. I mean, I pretty much know what I'm getting if I stay at a Renaissance or Courtyard, but if I stay at some independent one-off, it's nice to hear from the voice of experience. I rarely decide to choose or avoid a place on the basis of one review, though... I usually look to the aggregate numbers to make decisions.

I'm Tripadvior's Nr. 1 Explorer with more posts in more countries than others.

Tripadvisor has been very helpful to me in countries where there is absolutely no info, no guide books, no hotel listings, no other sources of information.

For example try to find the best hotel in Khujand, Tajikistan or Magas, Ingushetia without knowing kyrillic. (Both are initially my posts ;) )

My criticism of Tripadvisor in this regards is that

* they are slow to add new properties

* they are politically biased (not listing hotels in countries & places that are not fully recognised by the US)

Tripadvisor is an increasingly poor indicator of hotels & activities...

Don't believe me?

Check out the reviews for the hotels & activities YOU KNOW intimately, places in YOUR town or where you visit often enough to never check reviews, you will be VERY surprised just how misaligned the reviews are with the truth.

For example, what has arguably been Dublins finest hotel for 140 years... is ranked #40 something, on TA. Being out ranked by utter dives of B&B's, even taking cost in to account, there is no justification for it. Its FULL of misinformation (even the most basic things).

One thing I do check... for an A*hole of a manager, nothing shows how unprofessional a hotel can be run more, than a manager who argues with an unhappy guest publicly.

& Some Asian countries clearly ahem* "edit reviews"

Well, you have to learn how to read & filter the bias on Tripadvisor, just like the propaganda in the mainstream media.

Once you know what's wrong, you can still get some info out of them.

Then limit the list to "luxury" hotels.
If that hotel still doesn't appear on top, check if comments are "arrogant" or "expensive" => clear indicator that this is MY type of hotel !!! (and not for the hoi polloi)

Agree

I'm with you on this point. During the course of the past year I've been spending a lot of time in Nanning where ta's coverage was and is awful. That said it was an invaluable resource to me early on because it gave me the direction needed to start poking around in the right places. In other words even though the top rated restaurants are rubbish the tend to be located near nicer restaurants. Furthermore about three months in I started receiving useful tips from other members.