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
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.