So long as we know such practices exist, they are not so bad. Win-win for the reviewer and the hotel.

As for the rest of us consumers, we're reminded to remain vigilant and skeptical.

Most likely it was not in Thailand particularly in Phuket where I got this kind of response on my review for so called 4* hotel where hotel personnel is scamming guests for 'broken and missing items' in the room:

BTW, the clear indication of fake reviews is that if you see bunch of 4*/5* reviews coming on a short period of time and all these reviews are only for that particular attraction/hotel. Above hotel is the classical case of such fake/bought reviews - it opened in February and already has bunch of such 5* reviews. Clearly a red flag for any savvy traveller.

TLDR/

TripAdvisor is of course part of Expedia/Hotels.com so it's in their interests to get good reviews so that they can then get the booking, for which they receive enormous commissions. So it is somewhat of a symbiotic relationship...

On the other hand, I have stayed at hotels (and even B&Bs) with the key card emblazoned with the TripAdvisor logo, and with me being urged to leave a review - these tend to be hotels who do the right thing seemingly all the time and are confident in what they offer.

Similar case here. I wrote a bunch of reviews and curiously the only one not published was the one where I gave a restaurant 1 star and was highly critical. They did not publish it for several weeks - and not until after I threatened to stop submitting any more reviews to them and start publishing them on other websites.

For whatever reason, they are obviously trying to discourage the posting of negative reviews. My last negative review that did post sat pending for a week.

There is a restaurant in England called Hedone known for its chefs immaculate procurement of ingredients. If you want the most carefully selected fowl, bovine, crustacean, mollusc, etc, you go here.

The 1* and 2* negative reviews are almost exclusively from gluten-free msg-adverse non-fish eating raw food vegans who are baffled the restaurant couldn't cater to their chosen dietary restrictions.

These people should be dragged out in an alleyway and shot. Or at least slapped around a bit.

Nothing against those with true , involuntary food allergies. Or even personal preferences. It's just that I won't step into a dance club to complain that the music is too loud.

+1

The sense of entitlement some people have is staggering. I've also seen those 1* reviews for great restaurants that 'refused to create a separate tasting menu on the spot to accommodate my vegan, gluten-free, lactose-intolerant diet, etc., etc.'

I also hate the ones who will write a review for say, Hedone, and say (with no detail whatsoever) something like, 'there's so much better food to be had in London'. Really? Where did you find better food? What was wrong with what you had?

Following this thread I was looking at some local restaurant reviews on TA to see hwo they squared with my experience. I found a lengthy one very critical of the service somewhere I had thought of as OK but average. Talking about this at dinner my daughter recognised the story - coincidentally she had been eating there at the same time as the reviewers. Her view, they were drunk, obnoxious and abusive and it was a relief to all when they left. Just goes to show.

Doesn't Booking.com have a better review system? It only allows people that booked the hotel through their website to review it. While I may not always book a room through them, I do use them for the reviews.

To me, that's a bad review system -- it implies the only reviews worth reading are from those people who use a 3rd party booking engine.


FWIW, I just had several of my reviews published, and one was a pretty bad review (2 stars) of a H.Inn and another was a "meh" average review.

it has always been very easy for properties to have reviews removed
that does not mean there is not (any) data to be found on tripadvisor

booking.com is priceline, which is expedia's competitor
priceline did a deal with tripadvisor after expedia spun it off

Proof? What you are saving is patently false without hard definite proof.

I am also a top contributor and have never had a review rejected.

I used to be a fraud analyst at TA. You guys are wrong- while some bad reviews do get through the filters, TripAdvisor does not protect certain listings from bad reviews. Believe me, I have no love for this company after the class A ***** that took over my department got me fired for calling her out on questionable management practices, but the company (which is no longer related to Expedia by the way) does their best to maintain the integrity of their content.
Property owners can pay a fee for a higher level of service with TA which gets them a heightened level of response from the moderators when they want a review removed from their listing, which might be the reason some of your reviews get gummed up in the works, but if the disputed review meets the community guidelines, the review will be posted. Period.
And believe me, the behavior of the owners who make these disputes is tracked for abuse/fraud just as closely as as the members who submit reviews.
Yes, there are organizations out there trying to game the system and sometimes bad reviews get on the site but the next time you see a 'computer generated' review, instead of complaining about it on here, simply use the reporting tool on TripAdvisor (located right in the review itself) and if it's truly a fake review I guarantee you it will be dealt with.

TripAdvisor stops selling tickets to several animal attractions
 

TripAdvisor has decided to stop selling tickets to attractions where humans come in contact with wild or endangered animals held in captivity.

This decision was based on rigorous consultation with animal welfare groups and associations. While the sale of tickets will be suspended, site users will still be able to review these attractions as per current policies.

TripAdvisor consultation group and partners include, among others, organizations like PETA and Association of Zoos and Aquariums that have locked heads consistently over animal welfare. Walking a tight rope, TripAdvisor has decided to continue selling tickets to zoos and aquariums. It will also include exemptions for domestic animals, supervised animal feeding programs, children’s petting zoos etc.

While TripAdvisor undertakes this big change it will also establish an appeals process for establishments that have been excluded through this update but can provide evidence and prove otherwise.

For those interested, a complete coverage with media release link is on my blog - http://travelupdate.boardingarea.com...elling-policy/

Yes, I agree with you. I use TripAdvisor to determine hotel rates, read traveller reviews, and list down top-rated places to visit. It's one of the most helpful travel sites, I think. ^

It is my preferred 'travel review site'.

I also really like it for traveler's photos.....not just the professional management photos of a hotel, room, or restaurant, but what it's really like when people are there.

Major reason I use. And when I review take photos. That helps a lot.

Has Trip Advisor lost the plot?
 

The reviews and the reality do not match. Tried to post honest views - and get bounced - especially the harsh but true negatives.

Are we wasting our time and money trusting Trip Advisor?

Dear Caulkgun1,

While much of what you say make sense, the whole trip advisor thing here in Asia is off track. I have even one owner brag about his method for removing bad reviews.

Unless it stops 'moderating' - it will destroy itself.

You are right the negative the reviews get delayed - and these are most important. Also i tend to only post bad reviews to warn off others - so if the system works there should be a lot more 'negatives' rather than positives. My conclusion is therefore many of the positives are fakes.

TripAdvisor censors bad reviews. Not trustworthy
 

I confirm that TripAdvisor censors negative reviews. I went to 2 hotels in Sharm El Sheik, Egypt, with my family in JAnuary 2017. One was absolutely horrible (IberHotel) the other was good (Royal Grand Sharm). I posted a review for both on the same day. Guess what ? The positive review for Royal Grand Sharm was published in a couple of days. The negative review about Iberhotel was put in a pending status for a few weeks then it just disappeared! So I reposted it. Same thing happened : pending for a few weeks, than it disappeared again a second time! I have lost all trust in TripAdvisor and I am closing my account with them. What a band of crooks.

this place i have no idea if its good or not. because ive never been able to secure a reservation, after multiple tries, with a full weekends flexibility and a month's warning. its enjoyed the #1 spot in budapest for years on years with 3,400 excellent to 50 terrible reviews.

someone recently dropped this.

entitled much?



there was another gem i ran into recently. a restaurant with sparkling reviews, with a solitary 1* review from a guy who said more or less

the response from the restaurant was a stunner:

Same with Booking.com, except you can't repost, and the customer service does not even bother to come up with any answer at all.

Why not post that review on Flyertalk?

I stopped reading TripAdvisor a long time ago. It is dominated by travellers on a low budget where the best means the cheapest.

I always rate in comparison to expectations (i.e. an airport Holiday Inn that's clean and quiet with comfortable beds and working internet probably is going to get 4 or 5 stars, if I'm staying at an Intercontinental in a major city it'll take a bit more than that) but I agree a lot of people don't. I generally ignore any 1 or 5 star reviews from anyone who only has one or two total. I wish TA had an easy way to filter out reviews from anyone with less than ten.

people
 

it's the people who lie and make stuff up (good or otherwise) for money that ruins these things.

AI might be able to weed them out some day.

But how are you going to distinguish authentic from fake reviews. I left very good reviews for some restaurants and hotels and they truly deserved such a review. Others may think it's fake.

Tripadvisor works for me only by reading reviews in bulk. If I don't target a specific hotel/restaurant, I sort out the restaurants that have very little (generally <50 in smaller cities and less than 100-500 reviews (depending on the size of the city) in downtown areas of big cities), but very positive reviews.

After that I read

• a few very good comments (overtime you can tell when someone is exaggerating and making stuff up)
• a few very bad comments (again. Overtime you can see when a person is just trying to find things to make a restaurant hotel look bad; cf. the "My Rolls didn't have curtains" of the FT review of the Peninsula Hong Kong)
• a few from the middle (they usually seem to give the most decent reviews)

So far my method has not failed me. On some occasion I did get a bad vibe from some places (even before stepping in) and did a last minute change.

There was a classic fake review on TA the other day.

There is a programme here in the U.K. Called "four in a Bed" which takes 4 sets of B&B / small hotel owners and they stay at each other's properties them mark each other on hosting, facilities, cleanliness, breakfast and whether or not they would stay there again, before paying "what they think their stay was worth" - as you can imagine there are some wonderful game players taking part who underpay huge amounts for the most trivial faults just to try and win a tacky plaque.

There was one establishment where the owner was a bit of an arse, constantly bragging about his award winning breakfast, before he made a hash of it on their night of hosting. Their place (the Mariners in Seaton, Devon)was lovely, and you could see that the breakfast was indeed usually very good, and it was indeed good value for money - they didn't win because of a game player underpaying everyone......

Anyway, the show was repeated recently, and lol and behold, suddenly a negative review appears from a disgruntled guest who alleges he stayed there in either December or January, and wasn't happy - the owner came back and basically called him a liar who could not have possibly stayed there on the dates in question, because the place was closed for winter and some refurbishment work, and pointing out that he review was left only because the programme had been shown again.

It's also very obvious that viewers react angrily to owners who are nasty about the others or who game play and leave negative reviews on TA and on comments on the establishments Facebook pages.

As far as I know,

i suspect Qatar use lots of fake reviews to counter bad publicity. Lots of places do it. i know lots of places in the Philippines use paid agents - who call them up - to make sure they are ratted at the top. The Sunny Side Cafe and the Cowboy Place in Boracay definitely use someone - cause the place bears no resemblance to what is said in the *5 reviews.

I haven't see this discussed on this thread. Maybe it was posted elsewhere. Basically this fellow opened a hoax restaurant that he made a top rated London restaurant based totally on fraudulent reviews.

I Made My Shed the Top Rated Restaurant On TripAdvisor

I really like the subtitle though ...

It's starting to look like Tripadvisor is slowly but subtly transitioning into a booking site as opposed to a review site... the review functions are becoming less and less prominent.

It's to the point where at the current rate things are evolving, I expect Google to become my go-to site for travel reviews pretty soon. I'm writing more and more of my reviews on Google instead of TA these days.

in the end...
 

we will have to return to empirical data once again.

the like farms and review factories will infiltrate any sort of review system eventually.


​​​​

I didn't know TA had fake reviews. They always post my reviews and I had two 1 star experiences with photos to back it up.

The booking ads are annoying tho

Some of the businesses seem to have a lot of single review reviewers saying wonderful things about the business, While not all are fraudulent, personally I suspect a majority are.

I really wish Tripadvisor had a function to filter out anyone who only has only posted one review.

I also agree that the reviews are becoming less and less prominent and getting to "traveler ranked" vs "what we want you to book" is requiring more clicks as well as being more well hidden. Five years ago Tripadvisor was a great site to use when planning a trip to a new place. Now they're monetizing themselves in to being just another booking site.

Agree on the review count filter (or non-filter) issue.

But I like the search function. You can select really bad reviews or really positive reviews and then search based on topic and then ignore the single review reviewer in a much smaller result set.

I've started checking google reviews in addition to TA. Again, you have to be careful with the one hit wonder reviewers (who come on to boost ratings of a place). Tend to trust reviewers who've left more reviews (and based on the quality of those reviews).

TA seem to run in to various difficulties with their "members" (users?), who complain on the forums about TA's shortcommings. The latest is a "glitch' in their review site, where when someone leaves a review, TA asks the user to "confirm location of business", and when he/she does so, the system throws an error "please try again later".

TA have these bods called 'destination experts', so as soon as someone posts anything negative about TA, they pounce on the disgruntled member/user, defending TA to the death. Sometimes not exactly sure what they are defending. (They seem adamant it's 'something')

I've left a handful of reviews, usually they've been published after 3-4 days. One review I posted recently about a hotel, TA got back to me asking to "confirm the accuracy of your description of the experience" (before a certain deadline) if I actually saw the odd cockroach at the hotel. I "confirmed" this and the review was published. (but, do all users do this?..or does it sit in their inbox until after the deadline?) Of course, a week after my review, the 'one review wonder' reviewers start praising the hotel about cleanliness and how good the wifi is (this was also something I mentioned in my review).

I'm pretty sure many experienced travelers are on to the one 'hit wonder reviewers' and ignore them with glee.

I agree totally about google reviews. How many have you seen with just 5 starts (or 4 or 3) and absolutely no associated text? Or just some stupid phrase like "Great place!".

Starting to see similar patterns on Yelp as well. IMO this is nothing unique to TA.

I will actually give credence to a single review reviewer if I see a lot of detail and what appears to be valid reasoning for their review (and if I see the same information posted in other reviews). But it doesn't happen often.

I don't see this much in the US, but when I was in Vietnam and Thailand, I had restaurants give me a free beer if I left a 5-star review. Sometimes I would, sometimes I wouldn't.