How to Remove a Fake Negative Comment From TripAdvisor

TripAdvisor is free for people to research their travel plans, post recommendations, or warn others about negative experiences. TripAdvisor doesn't book rooms or sell you cruises, although its main revenue is from advertising those products and other travel related services.

It's critics say that anyone can register with TripAdvisor and make a comment, without necessarily being a visitor to that attraction (restaurant, activity, tour, hotel, etc), which is true.

Unlike Expedia, which requires you to book your room through them before you can make a review about that hotel, TripAdvisor is subject to abuse despite the claim "that all reviews are screened by staff, and that they have algorithms to detect abuse."

So what do you do when your nice, cheery, and positive review page on TripAdvisor is tainted with (a) fresh negative comment(s)?

or

You do a search in TripAdvisor and find your business name being slandered in a thread on a non-related topic?

This information is taken directly from The Trip Advisor page, What is considered fraud? Check the link for their current definition as this won't be updated if they change their policy.

Reviews of accommodations, attractions and restaurants should only be written by TripAdvisor members that have had a customer service experience that they want to share with the community.

The following actions may be considered fraudulent:

- Attempts by an owner (or agents working on behalf of the ownership of a property) to boost the reputation of a property by:

• Writing a review for their own property
• Asking friends or relatives to write positive reviews
• Submitting a review on behalf of a guest
• Copying comment cards and submitting them as reviews
• Pressuring a TripAdvisor member to remove a negative review
• Offering incentives such as discounts, upgrades, or any special treatment in exchange for reviews
• Hiring an optimization company, third party marketing organization, or anyone to submit false reviewsImpersonating a competitor or a guest in any way

Bottom line: Any attempt to mislead, influence or impersonate a traveler is considered fraudulent and will be subject to penalty.

- Attempting to damage his/her competitors by submitting a negative review.

As you can see, they are very specific in describing the type of user experiences they want posted on TripAdvisor.

Now, let's check the validity of the complaint. From the client-side of things, our resources are limited but we can still do some homework. The first thing to do is check out the author of the complaint.

Just left of the post is the author info: his avatar, username, and post count. A very low post count will indicate to you that it may be a fake account, but let's do some more research. Click on the username to get to the stats page for that TripAdvisor user.

In the Recent Forum Posts, check every post for mentions of your business. If this is your competition then chances are all the posts will be directed towards your business. Print out the user's stat page, and all the new threads negatively mentioning your business.

Also check to see if there are any conversations going on in the thread by multiple users. It could be your competition trying to beef up the thread by adding posts with conversations to himself with different accounts. It's usually innocent looking enough, like this:

User 1: Does anyone have any info on ________________? I'm planning my trip to ....."

User 2: Ya, I went there and it was so bad that _______________________ and I was scammed. It's a fraud, stay away at all costs!

User 1: Thanks for the advice.

If your competition is just plain stupid, this is where they put in a recommendation for their business. This would make things really easy to identify the origin of the complaints, but let's take the leap and assume your competition is a little craftier than that.

Do the same research for all the users who mention your business name. If it's your competition being sneaky, than it should be just a couple different usernames.

Click on their name and view their activity on TripAdvisor. Check the date between first and last post. Have they been on TripAdvisor for a while, or are they recently added members.

If they're recently added with few comments, read all the other forum posts. Do they frequently have conversations with User 1? That looks more suspicious than a user who, for example, makes posts every 6 months following a vacation somewhere.

Print out their user stats page and all the negative posts mentioning your business that you don't already have.

This requires dusting off the Fax machine. TripAdvisor does not give their email address on the Contact Us page. The options are snail mail or Fax. And do you really want to wait a week for them to get your letter?

Didn't think so.

In your letter to TripAdvisor, be polite. They didn't write the negative post, and with their help the fraudulent content will be removed from the site.

Here is a sample letter to TripAdvisor you can use for your complaint removal.

Dear TripAdvisor

A recent TripAdvisor thread post has come to my attention negatively mentioning [name of your business] in [name of city your business is in].

I have attached the negative thread posts in question to this Fax, along with the User stat page for the author(s).

I read what TripAdvisor considers to be fraud, and believe the attached posts fall into your definition of fraudulent posts.

Thank-you for your time,

Your name

Your Position in the company

Company name

Your email

Your Phone

Use a company letterhead when you print your letter to TripAdvisor.

Look as professional as possible, and draft up a cover sheet to indicating the number of pages in the fax, return phone number and email.

Fax the package to TripAdvisor office number listed on the About Us page: 617-670-6301.

TripAdvisor's response time is fast, and you will usually receive a reply within a few hours to a day. Once they receive the Fax, they will probably do the following things:

• Locate the complaints on their server and identify the IP addresses used
• Review all the other activity by the users in question
• Replace the fraudulent posts with a message from TripAdvisor stating the post has been removed
• Contact you by email informing you that the posts have been taken down

Due in part to the power of Google and some TripAdvisor glitch, after the negative comment has been replaced with the TripAdvisor take-down message, the comment will continue to appear in Google listings. When you click on the listing in the search engine results page, it will take you to the take-down message, but it shows the strength of Google's indexing.

If you have a competitor posting negative comments about your business on TripAdvisor, where else are they posting comments about you? While it's relatively easy to get TripAdvisor to remove negative content about you, it's impossible on sites like PissedConsumer, Complaintsboard, or sites the competitor owns. You will want to look into reputation management to take a defensive strategy to taking control of your search engine results pages.

I appreciate any comments or suggestions on all my Hubs. Help me out and let me know what you think, or would like to see next.

I'm a professional Reputation Manager specializing in defending the online reputations of resorts and timeshare companies.

The techniques I use to burying negative content in Google search results are effective, ensuring your prospective clients cannot find any damaging information about you or your business.