As a business owner, it’s likely that you will occasionally receive feedback from a guest which is not be as positive as you may have hoped for. Nobody likes to receive negative reviews, but this will happen occasionally when operating a service-oriented business. It’s impossible to live up to expectation 100% of the time, but learning to adapt to this is important. But what happens when a guest leaves a TripAdvisor review which isn’t based upon reality, or fact? Perhaps they never even visited your business, or mistook it for another similarly named establishment?
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Fraud Detection and Review Moderation
TripAdvisor have been receiving reviews from users for a very long time – so they’ve gotten pretty good at detecting fraudulent reviews or ones which don’t meet their community guidelines. All reviews which are submitted to the site are checked against these guidelines to ensure that they are not defamatory or unsavoury for visitors to read. This process also catches a lot of the noticeable red-flags for fake reviews, such as intentionally biased opinions or derogatory comments.
Beyond these community guidelines, TripAdvisor also have a very experienced team moderating reviews which are flagged as suspicious. Understandably, a considerable amount of this attention is focused upon ensuring that business owners don’t have fake positive reviews submitted to TripAdvisor to avoid astroturfing as they stand to benefit the most from faked positive reviews.
Getting fake traveler reviews removed
But what happens if you encounter a traveler review for your business which you believe to be suspicious or even fake. There is no need to panic. TripAdvisor have incentives to ensure that the reviews on their site are as legitimate as possible to ensure that travelers trust the opinions left by others – so it’s in their best interest to address it, too!
Within your Owners’ Centre, you will be able to dispute the review left by the anonymous traveler. Simply navigate to the Manage reviews section within you account complete the Dispute a Review form with the necessary information.
Some tips from Customer Alliance:
- Be as concise and informative as possible and provide as much relevant evidence as possible which may support your case.
- If possible, specifically address why the review does not meet TripAdvisor’s Review Guidelines.
- Address specifics regarding the fake review so it’s clear to the moderator why the review must be fake.
- Try to avoid emotions from your dispute as this will only cloud the judgement of the TripAdvisor team.
What happens if the review does not get removed?
Unfortunately, TripAdvisor may not always agree that a review is fake or not meeting the community guidelines. Whilst this may be difficult to accept as a business owner, transparency is key for TripAdvisor and sometimes dealing with uncomfortable situations is necessary.
If this happens, it’s vital that you respond to the negative review and work on optimising your profile. Firstly, you need to respond to the negative review in an appropriate manner. This will demonstrate to potential future visitors that despite not agreeing with the review, you are still empathetic. Secondly, it’s natural that you will want to get this review out of sight from other visitors to your TripAdvisor profile page as soon as possible.
With Customer Alliance, it’s really simple to allocate more guest review collection to your TripAdvisor profile within your backend – after a few days, you should have collected a number of new (and hopefully positive!) reviews to your profile. Considering that TripAdvisor display the 5 latest reviews on the business profile page by default, you only need to collect a few more to push the unwanted review to the second page. There is a saying in the online marketing world: “The Best Place to Hide a Dead Body is Page Two of Google” and the same applies with TripAdvisor.
Interested in learning more about Online Reputation Management?
Get a copy of our Ultimate Guide to Online Reputation Management and find out how to deal with online reviews and portals!
