Regarding the chap who had his reviews deleted, I had something very similar happen to me. I booked and prepaid for a room in a decent hotel. Upon arrival they asked for a £150 deposit. I offered them my Visa debit card, but they said they only accepted Mastercard for deposits. This really set my alarm bells ringing, but it was late and I had tired kids with me so I had go look for an ATM to get cash to pay the deposit.
The rest of the stay was Okay, just this weird deposit thing that really jarred me. So I mentioned that in my TripAdvisor review - the review dissapeared and TripAdvisor wouldn't tell me why. Looking at other review sites, plenty of other people had the same experience. It would appear that it was easier for the hotel to get these negative reviews taken off TripAdvisor than from other sites.
But why anyone takes TripAdvisor seriously after the whole "Shed at Dulwich" debacle is beyond me.
>It would appear that it was easier for the hotel to get these negative reviews taken off TripAdvisor than from other sites.
Did you mention anything about the 150 pounds in your review?
IMHO, "complaining about price" in any arguable fashion seems to be reason enough to get something removed.
If you would have said "I really disliked their checkin process", the review would probably stand.
I have done consulting for an extreme micro-manager of a small business who was on the phone to trip advisor with every single negative review she received. The only time she was ever able to get a review removed was if it mentioned her prices in some fashion.
"They charged too much" is not a useful review comment. "There are _unlisted_ charges that you should be aware of: ..." is, and should never have been taken down. However, that review should of course also go with a complaint to tripadvisor and request for them to update the listing to include these hidden charges.
I posted a paragraph describing the hotel, room and restaurant as being nice and clean and that the food was good.
THen another paragraph starting with "You should be aware of the strange deposit requirement.." and then going into the detail of what happened and ending with me saying that I found the experience soured my opinion of what was otherwise a good stay.
>THen another paragraph starting with "You should be aware of the strange deposit requirement.." and then going into the detail of what happened and ending with me saying that I found the experience soured my opinion of what was otherwise a good stay.
Yes so again, in my experience, if the price of the "strange deposit" was mentioned whatsoever anywhere in the comment, that seems to be all tripadvisor needs to see to get a review deleted.
In my experience paying a deposit when checking in, even when you've already paid for the room, is very common. The deposit is to cover things like room service charges, use of the mini bar, etc. If you don't use it then they cancel it with your credit card company and you don't actually get charged. Having said that, £150 is definitely a bigger deposit than I would expect and only taking mastercard is unusual.
I noticed this for a few hotels when traveling to New Zealand recently, a few hotels required a $100-200 deposit - in cash only. As I'd been using a Revolut card for purchases and it was near the end of the holiday so I didn't want to have to try to spend the deposit before returning home, I simply went with a different hotel that didn't have this condition (it was clearly stated on their booking.com page).
I don't know if they'd had problems with stag nights in the past with people leaving a mess...
> But why anyone takes TripAdvisor seriously after the whole "Shed at Dulwich" debacle is beyond me.
Becuase when I've traveled I've just hit up the top TripAdvsior attractions and restaurants and have always had a great time. I've never ended up at a "Shed at Dulwich."
"But why anyone takes TripAdvisor seriously after the whole "Shed at Dulwich" debacle is beyond me."
Let's be fair - the Shed at Dulwich was done by Vice and took a fake phone and months of effort, along with an entire network of friends to "verify" the restaurant via fake reviews.
That level of effort needs to be taken into consideration I would think before you just write off the whole site/service.
That being said, there are many, legitimate issues with all of these review sites like TA and Yelp.
It does not have to be a scam at all, it can just be very annoying and I would mention that in a review as well.
* It might be a way to save the hotel the cc processing costs (or even just time, if outside a 1st world country). This easily adds $10 to my bill for having to use my EC card (EC := debit card used a lot in Europe) in a foreign country at a foreign bank's ATM.
* That deposit could just be the daily limit for your card in that country. You'll unfortunately have to eat at the hotel because they are the only ones who graciously let you pay the day after.
* It might be a scam to get you seek the next ATM where someone is waiting for you and you start the millionaires' tour: Use all cards at gun- or knife point until their limits are reached.
> get you seek the next ATM where someone is waiting for you
Am sure this is what a bar in the Canaries tried with me, a 4 level bar/restaurant with about 10 rooms and their story was "this card machine is broken" "this one's out of battery" etc, then "there's an ATM just over there, I'll take you there...".
If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, don't be surprised if they steal your bread.
On the Canary Islands I'd rather expect a skimmer in the ATM, not getting mugged. Also, the tourism industry there is notorious for exploiting employees - when people pay in cash tips tend to be higher.
I'm not saying it was a scam. What I am saying something odd was going on.
I booked and prepaid the hotel with my Visa debit card. When I arrived they wanted a deposit for £150, which they would only accept using a Mastercard. I have never encountered any business that only accepts Visa OR Mastercard.
I don't have a Mastercard, so I was told I had to pay the deposit in cash. That was just really odd.
>IIRC there's also video reportage about it to be found...
The VICE piece is here:
How to Become TripAdvisor’s #1 Fake Restaurant
The Shed at Dulwich was the number one rated restaurant in London, with foodies, celebrities and bloggers trying to get a table. The main obstacle for them, however, was that it didn't exist. Over the course of 8 months VICE's Oobah Butler used an assault of fake reviews to get his 'restaurant' to the hallowed top spot on TripAdvisor.
My friend manages the online presence of a dentists, and nearly all negative reviews turn out to actually be about another dentist with a similar name about 60 miles away. So this does happen all the time on TripAdvisor, and they aren't doing anything about it! TripAdvisor makes zero attempt to verify that you've even been to the places you're reviewing, when it would be trivial for them to do so.
a simple "Please confirm this the place where you have been? <pictures>" while posting would prevent many (most?) errors.
You could use a plethora of other information to show this intelligently and not bother everyone (e.g. if you have been in the area, if you looked for the place beforehand etc)
I don't think there's "an" explanation. There are lots of false reviews on the internet. Some are honest mistakes, like you said. Some are intended to artificially raise or lower the target's reputation.
And some are stolen, automated, or low-effort content that's not intended to affect the target at all, but exists only to make the account seem legitimate so it can't be trivially identified as having the sole purpose to astroturf one target.
I think there's plenty of reason to believe each of these categories is responsible for a ton of internet content.
I went to "according to tripadvisor" the best activity in Tenerife, a zoo called Loro Parque. I described the poor situation of the animals with photos and my comment got censored by tripadvisior, probably due to the great amount of money that they get from the park.
From that day I stopped using Tripadvisor after making 100s of reviews.
Disclaimer: I'm not related with them in any form and there is a lot of time since my last visit, so I could be wrong.
Loro parque is known to host and reproduce a lot of endangered species of parrots and help it to recover from extinction with private money. As private zoo it has a very good reputation of taking lots of troubles to keep the animals as happy as they can.
They had an escape bat incident some years ago, solved, and there was the history of the killer whale Morgan with several animalist organisations figthing to avoid the park rescuing a deaf and starving dutch killer whale. It seems that some people would prefer the young lost whale dead than in captivity, for ideological reasons. Eventually Loro parque won all trials and collect all legal permits to keep an animal that would not survive a year in the ocean but is still alive and well and even has a calf in 2018. They even had to feed the calf with a bottle.
I'm not aware of anything really dark or wrong with them. Looks like a good modern zoo; In fact it is classified routinely as one of the bests zoos in Europe if I remember correctly.
All zoos are like that and incredibly sad from the inside even if they look fine to the guests. The only ones that have a moral leg to stand on are the rehabilitation ones that use proceeds to help the animals, but it's still a very wishy washy thing to be running an animal prison for profit.
Yes. I support a local non-profit ape rescue centre. The vast majority of their primates were rescued from the pet trade, medical research, beach photographer props, circuses. Some have disease (e.g. rickets) / deformities from poor diet in their pre-rescue lives, while others lack social or survival skills. Some have physical injuries, e.g. from their teeth being knocked out by their previous owners. These factors mean that a return to the wild is rarely possible (assuming the original environment still exists).
The staff are passionate about looking after these primates and do not see the centre as a moral issue. The fact that the animals need to be rescued in the first place is the real moral issue.
Interestingly, the centre's worse reviewers are those who expect a zoo run for the visitors benefit, and who complain about the ‘untidy’ enclosures (i.e. good climbable trees that make it hard to see any action) or the fact that a given primate might have chosen to sit quietly in a sunny area where it has good privacy, rather than perform on demand.
I suspect that figure is wrong, because the Bureau of Justice Statistics does not publish the rate on prisons but on prisoners.
"As of 2016, 8.5% of the prisoners are in private for-profit prisons. Since 2000, the number of people in private prisons has increased 47%, compared to an overall rise in the prison population of 9%."
So, if the annual increase rate has not change since 2016, as of 2019 about 9.3% of the prisoners are in for-profit jails.
[edit: computed the rate, it is not "more than 10%"]
TripAdvisor has some of the most consistently over-inflated reviews of all user-driven review services. I've been burned as well and now when I end up in a country that only has TA I'll do the physical legwork to find what I'm looking for, or search for independent blogs or better curated local resources.
This immediately reminded me of the article on vice in which the author made his gazebo the best restaurant on Tripadvisor.
Both the article and the video are very entertaining.
I stopped using TripAdvisor because I found that it has a very strong tourist bias. It seems most of the people who post reviews are tourists, and this ends up being beneficial to places that aren't necessarily the best in their categories, but offer the most tourist-friendly experiences. When I'm looking for a restaurant abroad I'm not looking for the places that have English-speaking service, translated menus, and memorable decoration. I'm looking for the places that have the most genuine and best tasting food, places that locals would like to visit. It's hard to find those places on TripAdvisor.
You are correct about the "bias", but the site name is TripAdvisor, so I disagree with calling it a bias. You just aren't the target customer.
If you want more sophisticated reviews you can always go with Rick Steves, who usually does a good job of pointing out what are the most popular restaurants for tourists and contrasting that with the most popular restaurants for locals.
There are also fake reviews purchased by competition to lower the score of their competitors. I can't trust anything in form of a comment that I see on the internet anymore (oh the irony).
The rest of the stay was Okay, just this weird deposit thing that really jarred me. So I mentioned that in my TripAdvisor review - the review dissapeared and TripAdvisor wouldn't tell me why. Looking at other review sites, plenty of other people had the same experience. It would appear that it was easier for the hotel to get these negative reviews taken off TripAdvisor than from other sites.
But why anyone takes TripAdvisor seriously after the whole "Shed at Dulwich" debacle is beyond me.