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.