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 ...