Censorship at TripAdvisor re bogus hotel reviews
 

TA just removed an entire thread of several pages regarding bogus reviews of a hotel in Rome. It was on the Rome destination forum and contained very valuable contributions from experts regarding the "star system" in Italy and how it differs from other systems. There are a selective few members on some TA forums who like to bully and delete posts. Also, TA staff do not tolerate questions about investigation of suspicious reviews and regularly delete them. I also just learned that the helpful votes are not audited so a hotel or reviewer can vote for themselves. We should all ignore helpful votes. I'd like to post more information about the hotel and the suspicious reviews without fear of censorship. Can I do that here at FT or on some other venue?

Thanks for listening.

This topic was discussed in another thread. I analyze 18 TA reviews for the Hotel Rival in Stockholm and conclude most of them are fake. I submit that TA and similar review sites have devolved into uselessness. The better info is here on FT.

Most interesting: I discovered some people actually write reviews intentionally that sound like ad copy from an 8-year old: "The balmy Indian summer made the panoramic view from the plush 150-thread count couch even more dreamy."

These days I mainly use Tripadvisor for the reviewer pictures. I find it's a great way to see what hotel rooms actually look like, rather than what they advertise on their websites. I saw one stellar review that had pictures included only the pics were the same as the hotel's official ones. Oops!

Good for you! I agree with you on your analysis plus the fact that TA reviews have been severely devalued by their lack of enforcement. I'm also pleased to learn that FT has not censored you and therefore values your contribution.
I will now take the risk and post my own suspicions.

"use Tripadvisor for the reviewer pictures".

Would you be surprised to learn that TripAdvisor censors reviewer photos? I've had quite a few rejected with no reason. In one case, I uploaded a photo of a pizza chef with the backdrop of his wood-fired oven and wonderful ingredients. The restaurant manager gave me permission to take his photo and they looked forward to seeing it since it was the chef's birthday. But, rejected for no reason and no way to add photos later. Go figure.

Oddly enough, I have one fewer review on TA than I did last week. Not sure which one they excised yet.

How can a reputable company behave so irresponsibly? Perhaps they didn't watch Social Network "The Internet's not written in pencil, Mark, it's written in ink". TripAdvisor is written in pencil and they give big erasers to not only staff, but also to senior forum members.

On Yelp they allow you take a look at all the reviews they have filtered out of the results for each establishment for various reasons. Amusing to find restaurants with a dozen or more sham reviews.

TA could use something similar, as both the # and % of fake reviews is just getting absurd.

I would like to see them at least give me a challenge first, before unilaterally deleting. I could at least try to dig up an old receipt to prove I had the experience in question.

What a cool feature to discover on Yelp! Thanks so much for mentioning it. At the very bottom of all the reviews on the left side is a note saying how many reviews have been filtered out. If you click on it, it shows the hidden Yelp reviews. I can't say I agree with their censorship, but it is certainly more helpful than TripAdvisor's stance on fake reviews.

Grand Hotel Plaza Rome
 

OK. I am trusting FT members with my suspicions regarding a hotel in Rome Italy. My belief is that they are manipulating reviews on TripAdvisor, yet TA has done nothing to investigate this property. Yes, we did stay there and found it to be the worst European hotel in our many years of traveling. We checked the public areas again in January and found it to be unchanged, filthy, smelling of sewage, and badly in need of renovation and maintenance.

Yet, this TA member writes a glowing review stating that he is a UK tour operator traveling undercover and will now send his clients to this dump.

See his review here:

Suspicious review

It appears he also gave himself "helpful votes" to increase his credibility.

This property has "78 terrible" votes plus 72 voted "poor". TA does allow you to click on the bar chart of traveler ratings and see these honest reviews.

Other hotel reviews

Thanks for listening and any advice is appreciated.

Exhibit A while searching for hotels in Jordan (from two completely different reviewers):

"I stayed in Movenpick petra for 3 days and I had a great experience with this hotel. My room was clean, spacious and the hotel facilities were quite wonderful. I was also lucky to have a nice view from my hotel window. Toiletries were actually Dead Sea products which I very much liked! The staff were very helpful and I can say that I was well taken care of, they sent me complimentary fruitr basket. They had nice selection of restaurants and surprisingly they have an oof garden which was closed (open only summer ) I will recommend this hotel to my friends. "

Stayed April 2012, traveled as a couple

"I stayed in Grand Hyatt Amman for 5 days and I had a great experience with this hotel. My room was clean, spacious and the hotel facilities were quite wonderful. I was also lucky to have a nice view from my hotel window. Toiletries were actually Dead Sea products which I very much liked! The staff were very helpful and I can say that I was well taken care of, they sent me complimentary food and they also advised me which places to go to in order to see nice views of the city. They had nice selection of restaurants and surprisingly they have an awesome Asian restaurant at this hotel (one of the best Asian restaurants I ever experienced)! "

Stayed September 2011, traveled on business

For that review the key for me is " I went largely “under-cover” "

By that I am guessing he did no such thing, the hotel were fully aware that he was a travel agent scouting the property and thus a) gave him a good room that had been well cleaned b) ensured the service he received was top notch, and perhaps different to what Joe Bloggs experiences and c) for things like breakfast they perhaps increased their usual offerings to give a good impression.

Also, I am guessing he focused on the positives, having decided he will send people there (It is a good location, he seems correct in the type of decor - if you like that sort of thing (antique / historical isn't my thing, but I know people who do like it), and things like a roof terrace (which may well be lovely, as he said it was closed for the season).

I have to say I don't find his review surprising, considering that 'Largely undercover' comment at the start.

Thanks very much, lancebanyon, for compelling proof of fraudulent reviews at TripAdvisor. If you posted even a hint of your information on the TA forums, you would be attacked by the "volunteers", your posts would be deleted, and your account disabled. I was hoping their censorship would change when they became a public company, but it hasn't happened. Also, it has been reported that some hotels have taken legal action against TA regarding dishonest reviews. From what I recall from Business Law, it is illegal to destroy or withhold evidence - which is what they are doing by deleting posts.

Thanks emma for your supportive comments which might very well sum it up. I tend to think more negatively about the hotel's manipulation since much of what is wrong is very hard to hide i.e. the smell and condition of the hallways and public areas. The location is perfect as you say, which gives me hope that it will be renovated someday. Meanwhile, they continue to defraud travelers and TripAdvisor does nothing about it.

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."

One reason that good ideas such as your's aren't implemented is because TA censors discussion of its problem areas such as fictitious reviews. Thankfully, we can freely discuss this on FlyerTalk.

I use TA a lot in my research, but usually not for hotels. For the little B&Bs I prefer when I travel to the UK and Ireland. Especially as I am now taking 7 other women with me on my next trip! After I've decided on a place, I get some recommendations from others I know have been there, and then read all the reviews of each choice on TA. I discount the older ones, as B&Bs change owners, update, etc. I discount the obvious complainers and the obvious gushers - I prefer the meaty ones, with details like, is it walking distance to a pub? Was there WiFi? (these places don't always have informative websites!).

I find the review details themselves (and the photos) to be very helpful!

The problem with TA (and other review sites for that matter) is that some people have an unrealistic expectation of a place and review according to how their expectation wasn't met. Ridiculous statements like "It was too far away from all the main tourist attractions" make things hard to accept ratings. No hotel is going to be right next to everything, that is absurd.

They complain about the hotel because it is a 15 minute train ride to the Eiffel Tower or something ridiculous like that. What do they want, everything in a one block radius of their hotel? How do you see a city that way? Some people are just too self involved to provide a coherent and relevant review of anything.

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TripAdvisor works fine for me, especially after I strip out the hyperbole.

You seem confident that you will never fall victim to clever manipulation of reviews. It concerns me that many travelers are more easily swayed and the highly experienced among us should raise our voices. Bogus reviews undermine the whole process and TripAdvisor, by censoring discussion, is continuing the myth of Honest Reviews. If, by chance, you are ever impacted by fraudulent reviews, TripAdvisor will censor you if you point out the specifics.

I must say in all my reviews I have only had one edited. I posted a picture of a Hilton airport hotels shuttle schedule and for some reason they removed it. I assume because it had Hiltons name on it or something. My post Newport Beach post mentioned above was posted as I wrote it.

I do understand what you mean but I just have not had many reviews edited but then again I have not had too many bad experiences. I typically am able to choose wisely and not end up in too many bad hotels.

Discretion required
 

I have been a contributor and user of TA for a number of years. I have found that one has to use as little common sense when interpreting comments. If a very negative post is from someone who has only ever posted once or twice then it may well be that they are venting their anger because of a comparitively minor thing - especially if other posts are generally positive. Similarly I have found, in one instance in particular, that single posts from people waxing lyrical about a hotel, should also be treated with suspicion. In the case I have in mind we had stayed there and found it pretty average. It was an old seaplane base in the Orkney Islands. Subsequent 'one off' reviews were rating it highly for beaches, shopping and wine, amongst other things (none of which exist - not opinion but physical fact). The one thing the posters had in common was that they all lived on or near the Orkney Islands. My suggestion to TA that it should be investigated was met with the removal of my posting about the site and the retention of the other quite misleading posts. I shall continue to use TA for research - I have had more positive experiences as a result, but will also continue to be a little more analytical about content and how long ago a post was made.

I was referring to censorship on the TA forums like destinations and support. If you write something negative, but true, about the manipulation of reviews - you will be attacked and censored. Like you, I have had TA photos removed for no apparent reason.

My experience, exactly! Why does TA "shoot the messenger" instead of investigating cases of abuse? I suppose in the short run they are successful in tricking readers into believing TA reviews are reliable. In the long run, honest sources of information like FlyerTalk will expose the problems and TA will be forced to adapt. Thanks for your reply.