Is that standard practice? Seems like a bit of a privacy issue if that's the case. Maybe I ticked a box in my Hilton profile allowing them to share my information

I don't know if it's standard practice, however, lately I have noticed that some properties where I have stayed have sent me emails encouraging me to post reviews on TripAdvisor. I suspect, but have no proof, that TripAdvisor offers hotels various bookings and confirmation tools.

Take a look at this TripAdvisor FAQ: TripConnect Instant Booking

I have found TripAdvisor useful for their offline smartphone city guides when going abroad.

Great Examples of TripAdvisor Corruption
 

I've been a user (and reviewer) on TripAdvisor since almost their inception. I have generally been positive about the service, and have always been a heavy user.

As some have pointed out here already, many of the reviews seem to be "crusades" by angry guests - not exactly a balanced review. On the other hand, I've found by reading a handful of the reviews (and checking the status of the reviewers), one can get an accurate picture of the property.

However I'm now of the opinion that the corporations/property owners are now "in control" of the process, and TripAdvisor reviews are being increasingly corrupted by insiders.

I recently had occasion to be in a Cairns, Queensland Australia hotel during a lunchtime meeting of the local tourism authority. I stuck my head into the meeting and was treated to a presentation by the tourism leadership on how to "get organized" and have each other property owner write glowing reviews on the region's hotels and restaurants.

Likewise, I recently wrote a review of an absolutely horrible Radisson Hotel experience in Bridgetown, Barbados. Among other things this 8 story hotel was operating with ALL the elevators out-of-service during a major remodeling that was never disclosed to the guests booking this hotel.

I attempted to lodge a review about this situation. It was rejected everytime I sent it in. I've been doing this a long while now with over 150 hotel reviews, and am cognizant on the way these reviews are to be submitted. This one never could make it through, and I was finally told "it is too harsh". Huh?

Meanwhile, the same hotel has reviews posted marked "Review collected in partnership with Radisson Hotels". I've attached one of the reviews. It is (like many of them) a couple sentences and then filled with apparently computer generated gibberish. Obviously some kind of compromised TripAdvisor system that allows the hotel to submit their own obviously fraudulent reviews.

I've noticed many experienced business travelers withdrawing from their reviewing of properties. TripAdvisor is now being run by the toadies.

http://i41.photobucket.com/albums/e2...%20Advisor.png

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.

This is why the traveller photos are so important. To me the standard of the bathroom is the by far most important thing so any photos showing that are invaluable.

+1 the quality of the bathroom is usually reflective of the quality of the hotel in general. Like a good steak - more marbling = better.

I love seeing travelers' photos! They are the best part of TA (other than the data collection aspect).

Generally speaking, when reading reviews, I focus on the reviews by veteran reviewers. If I see a glowing review from someone or "something" that has 1 or 2 posts, I immediately dismiss.

That's how I view it also. I also look at the other things reviewed by low count reviewers to see what their other reviews have been like.

I signed up and submitted 3 reviews. Two posted in a day; the third has been pending for a week.

The two that posted were positive. The one that's still pending is negative.

Positive reviews do seem to go up quicker. I have hundreds of reviews and almost all go up within a day. I posted a somewhat critical review recently and it did take a week.

They emailed me and said my negative review will not be posted because it was not "family friendly."

Here was the full text of my review.

I'd rewrite without the "butt hole "
 

And see if they post it

"butthole", very very clearly. Remove it, and re-post.

I agree. If you really need to include something that means the same thing, change the word "butthole" to "a sewer" or "sewer gas". That should pass the censors.

This is the first I've heard of reviews being rejected as "too harsh" - and very disappointing.

I too ignore reviewers with only a few posts ... and find that reviews starting "i wasn't sure what to expect ..." are often clearly bogus!

I've complained in the past that reviews of new locations were being rejected because the Tripadvisor staff couldn't/wouldn't authenticate the location - without giving me (a level 5 reviewer) a second chance to validate the new place.

So what can we use instead of Tripadvisor ??

Given that a poster just completely destroyed a NYC boutique hotel for bed begs (reviewer uploaded tons of nasty pictures), I'm having trouble with the notion that TA isn't reliable.

One thing most tourist & traveller's donot know, is the fact that 70% of the review on TA are bought either by the agencies which are directly link to the hotel & restaurant.

These form of fake review's is rampart on most review's communities. the agency usually paid few individual from different part of the globe to post positive review in favor of their services. This are known as paid review's. And because they are paid review's the administrator/moderator of such review site[s] have little or no control over them.However, they are quick to decline any negative review's against such companies.

*My suggestion is to always compare each of these review's based on from other review site's by extending your research upto 10th,11th,12th pages of google search engine. Probably, most geniue review(s) will be within the 11th,12th ..pages of google for same reason - that most agencies can go as far as hiring seo and reputation management to push such negative review's down to the last pages of google. So, in term's of review be patient to get to the last pages before dealing with such company.

Thanks
Chuck

Thanks

I wonder if people make a living writing positive reviews for hotels.

I am a top contributor to TA - I try and be totally honest. So far I have not had a review rejected.

I'm also a top TA reviewer. Never had a review rejected. When I search for hotels I read the majority of the reviews; good and bad. In the past I've stayed at non-chain hotels when in Paris. My next trip will be at an Ibis Styles hotel as I got a really great rate. I do like the smallish mom and pop style hotels. I just wanted to try something different this time.

Or rely on FlyeTalkers suggestions of hotels ;)

I agree and this is reflective of technological reviewing these days. When you look for a company / service what do you do? You google it. There's companies now who will manage your 'on line reputation' and I assume that means collecting the bare minimum of information and then glossing it up in to a review. It's the same as buying twitter followers or instagram followers like a lot of these Z list celebs do. They're followed by 1.2m people so they must be good. 850k of these are dummy accounts.

The same applies to a hotel, it's got 500 reviews but probably 150 or so are fake. There's a hotel near me a massive well known brand hotel, but it's always really quiet. Qatar is only really just getting off the ground but when any of the restaurants post a picture of a statement it get 500 likes straight away. The give away is that there's only 2 / 3 comments under it. It's all automated.

for balance - i got a review accepted by TA a few months ago, which included the fact that i had been propositioned by a (very friendly) prostitute in the hotel lobby !

but i suspect TA don't get much business through that (rather obscure) hotel - so they were probably more relaxed about a negative review.

i've tried using the reviews on Booking.com to evaluate a hotel - but have been shocked by how over-generous many of their reviews are (despite only accepting reviews from people who have actually stayed) !

i'm still looking for an alternative to TA ...

What do people think about airlinequality.com? I submitted a few reviews but stopped because they edited my submissions, not for opinions and content but for length The editing was crude and they just deleted odd phrases here and there so that my intended meaning was altered, the grammar trashed and on the last time the opinion was quite reversed. It is not as if there is a shortage of space in an on-line review.

I google "tripadvisor biased flyertalk" and found this thread.

Like the OP, I also just recently experienced a negative review being rejected for posting, twice. In fact, it was published and then subsequently removed with a email citing I did not comply to their review guidelines. Clearly I was being censored.

Maybe tripadvisor is now biased to property owners and seek to protect them especially against long time reviewers like myself. Tripadvisor is also a hotel booking engine at the same time and some hotels advertise on their website so neutrality in this case is questionable.

It's their website so their rules and they call the shots but I am disappointed with their course of action so from now on, I will choose not to contribute to TA any further.

I have doubts about just how independent TripAdvisor is when it comes to accepting very negative reviews of certain hotels/restaurants; with that said I've never had a review rejected or censored, but then I've only given a single 2 star review and maybe a dozen 3 stars.

I've seen some quite high profile examples of reviews being rejected, and they have generally come down to rather strict enforcement of the guidelines. One review which mentioned feminism was rejected, but then accepted with the same score and a couple of words changed. They rejected it initially because they felt it fell foul of their no "ethical commentary" guideline.

FWIW me neither.

I have had a few reviews rejected or delayed in recent months.

TA has been sitting a recent review (very negative) of mine for over a week now and I definitely think the OP here is correct and that it is a sullied process now.

There are huge numbers of fake reviews too.

That said, I usually find the time to post a negative review but not always for a positive one ;-)

TripAdvisor and Expedia share common ownership, and as such have a vested interest in not alienating the major chains from which they derive a good deal of income. I have noticed a perceptible increase in positive ratings for many of the branded properties in major markets, less so in secondary or tertiary areas. Perhaps this is due to major franchisors improving their quality control programs to counteract today's instant dissemination of information technologies that have the capability of making negative occurances go viral (e.g. bedbug photos).
My personal belief is that impartiality takes a backseat to revenue.

Haven't seen much activity in this thread of late.

Tripadvisor refused to post one of my reviews recently wherein I gave a low rating because the service was poor. It was a perfectly normal, I thought, critical review that mirrored many other recent reviews of the same restaurant. After a week pending, they said it didn't rise to their standards...

Care to actually post the review you wanted to give them, and the property it was about? It's a bit difficult to judge otherwise if that was reasonably denied or not..

Wrote a scathing review. The 5 star hotel offered to refund 2 night of accommodation and then asked me in return to remove my review.

No, I didn't save it. I think the takeaway lesson is that if I want to leave a negative review I need to populate it with much more detail than I would for a positive review. Not saying it was my best effort, just surprised that they filtered it. Maybe they're starting to face a backlash from some establishments.

I've written alot of trip adviser reviews and never had a problem having them post. I also rely on reviews when I travel. It's pretty easy to weed out the people who slam a place because of a one-off bad experience which wasn't the hotel's fault (I also weed out the reviews from shiny-happy people who love everything...the truth is always somewhere in between). If you see a suspect review, report it. I did this once when people gave a great local restaurant 1 star because they went on Monday (the one day each week when it isn't open) without checking the hours first. They didn't even eat there, so how could they write a bad review? The review was promptly removed.

It's not my job to moderate TA's reviews. In your example, it should have never gotten posted. It's not incumbent upon the consumer to do the work for them. That really gets at why TA isn't reliable.

You're absolutely right and I have no interest in policing their reviews. But, if I do see one like the example I gave, I will report it as a goodwill gesture towards a good business. Several hotels do monitor their own TA reviews and can report fraudulent ones like a competitor posting untrue false reviews. However, this doesn't address the problem of businesses getting family and friends to post fraudulent positive reviews or businesses buying bulk positive reviews.

Still, TA is currently the most comprehensive source for hotel reviews and I think it is still mostly reliable. The trick for consumers is to actually read reviews and judge for themselves, rather than simply relying on the star ratings.

I have found TA fairly reliable and have never not had a review posted. To weed out a 'bad' property, I simply filter out the 1* and 2* reviews, look at those, and determine whether or not those reviews reflect a 'one of' or a prevailing condition.

Good deal for you, but disappointing that such practices exist.