How To Remove Reviews From TripAdvisor

(ARTICLE UPDATED in October, 2021)
Editor's Note: Originally published in November 2019, this post has been completely updated and refurbished for comprehensiveness, accuracy and relevance.

What's in it for me?

Negative and Fake reviews aren't welcome even if there's no tomorrow! While getting a listing on TripAdvisor and receiving reviews seems like an enticing prospect altogether, nobody wants to go down the path of dealing with review removal. The step is crucial and challenging which requires you to deal with the task of removal based on circumstances. This guide is your savior as it prepares you for just that! Whichever factor is motivating you to request for review removal, you'll find it all here, step-by-step! Enjoy!

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Customer feedback is highly essential in ascertaining the overall reputation and goodwill of a business. Hence reviews play a pivotal role in helping the business prosper. Whether you are a hotel or any other business, your reputation over the OTA is extremely important for your customers.

One of the biggest players online is TripAdvisor. With over 884 million reviews of the world’s leading hotels and 490 million monthly active users, TripAdvisor dominates the search results and user ratings. Just as managing your reviews on this platform is important, is equally crucial to look for ways in which you can remove reviews from TripAdvisor.

Since TripAdvisor ranks amongst the highly visited OTA sites, reviews on TripAdvisor have a crucial role to play. Again, a review from one user is likely to influence other customers’ decisions to a great extent.

For instance, if someone claims that the property is immaculate and the staff service is excellent, you are likely to be drawn positively towards that comment. On the other hand, if someone complains about the property being grungy and staff incompetent, this will generally be a turn-off.

“94% of customers avoided a business based on negative review”

While the first step is to boost your popularity ranking on TripAdvisor to get more reviews, it is equally important to stay away from negative reviews. Everything that a customer writes about a hotel may not be accurate.

On the contrary, a review is more of a subjective opinion-a first-hand experience- that may or may not be the same for everyone. In a nutshell, all reviews are not reliable.

A deliberately crafted negative review bringing ill reputation to a business counts as fraudulent behavior. Hence every owner would be concerned about keeping away from such reviews which have the potential of influencing the customers negatively! Hence it becomes significant to remove reviews from TripAdvisor.

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How To Remove A Review From Tripadvisor

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‘Does TripAdvisor remove review?’ is perhaps one of the most popular questions being searched online by hoteliers. It is important to know that removing a TripAdvisor review is not an easy option and can be done only under specific circumstances.

As we are already aware, even a single negative or bad review on TripAdvisor has the potential to impact the ratings and reputation of any hotel. Therefore, it is important to address the situation by first emphasizing the performance and service. It is also the responsibility of the hotels to have a proper strategy in place to address the negative reviews for TripAdvisor.
Apart from a sound strategy to effectively deal with negative reviews, the authenticity of the review and its potential to inflict damage on the hotel’s reputation are some of the factors that lead to such a step.
Since one has no control over the negative reviews posted by the users, one has to opt for a viable solution. Sometimes the management or owner can disagree with the content of a review perceiving it as a little misleading or detrimental to the property’s overall reputation.
After all, there are two sides to every story!

Again, it is not so easy to delete a negative or bad review from TripAdvisor just like that.

Even the reviews where the renovation or new change has not been noted yet can be a little misleading for the prospective customers. In such cases, it is required to remove reviews from TripAdvisor and start afresh.
But TripAdvisor has a different policy when it comes to removing these reviews!

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How To Delete A Review On Tripadvisor

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Deleting a review from TripAdvisor is not an option in the first place for any business. Besides the obvious support in the form of ‘TripAdvisor review it,’ a listing business will have to look for different options to tackle the situation.
Based on the scenario, the approach will differ:

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1. Resolved Issues

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For instance, if you are able to resolve a customer’s issue, you can simply get in touch with them and ask them for an updated version of the review. Since they can’t edit the review once it is published, they can delete it and publish the updated version minus the negative part.
These are a few steps that will help the user in this regard:

○ Log in to TripAdvisor and go to the user profile.
○ Find the reviews to delete and click on the button with three dots on the review (top-right).
○ Click on ‘Delete’. After this, TripAdvisor will ask to confirm your delete request which can be done by clicking the button once more. Once done, you will receive an email confirming that the review has been removed.

[Note: TripAdvisor allows only one updated review per user for the same service or experience.]

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2. Fake Reviews

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Fake reviews are drafted specifically to defame a business or to simply bring an ill reputation to it with the aim of stunting its growth. Therefore, the hotels must not lag when it is required on their part to remove reviews from TripAdvisor. Besides, TripAdvisor categorizes fake reviews in three different categories:

i) Biased, Positive Reviews: Includes the scenario where the reviews are curated by friends, relatives, or someone having ties with the business. TripAdvisor has a Zero Tolerance Policy towards the scam reviews as it is believed to be compromising the integrity of this OTA platform. This kind of review boasting is considered illegal as per the norms of TripAdvisor.

ii) Biased, Negative Reviews: Some reviews are compiled solely with the aim of tarnishing a business’s reputation which is often labeled as ‘Vandalism.’ There can be a lot of possible sources behind this- a rival business trying to lower your ranking on the search page or someone blackmailing the business by using negative reviews as a threat.

iii) Paid Reviews: Sometimes a business might be lured to offer incentives to people in exchange for a larger number of good reviews. This kind of ‘Review Optimization’ is strictly prohibited and also goes against the TripAdvisor policy.

Speaking of that if you come across a fake review on your page, you will be required to flag it. You can report it to TripAdvisor through your Management Center Page.

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Here is the procedure:

○ Click on ‘Reviews’ at the top and select ‘Report a Review’
○ Under “Please tell us what the issue is” click on the ‘Report Fraud’ option.
○ Under “What do you want to do?” choose your issue type. Choices can be Blackmail Threat, Review Boosting, Review Vandalism, or Review Optimization.

○ You will have to answer two questions- if the review was already posted and if this is the first time you are filing the report of the incident.
○ Provide additional information about the reviewer (the month and year of their visit, name, and email address.)
○ Describe the event in detail and as clearly as possible in the text space provided.

[Note: It will take TripAdvisor a few days to process your request and you will be able to remove reviews from TripAdvisor only if the feedback is found to be genuine.]

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3. Violating TripAdvisor Guidelines

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TripAdvisor has its own set of guidelines when it comes to the ways in which you can remove reviews from TripAdvisor. If you feel that a review is “fraudulent or otherwise improper” (in TripAdvisor’s terminology), you can report it for violating these guidelines:

• Intolerant language (includes politics, religion, race, and sexual orientation)
• Profane or vulgar language
• Irrelevant information (such as the wrong business)
• Bias or blackmail (if someone threatens a bad review to get a discount)
• Stays older than a year old
• Second-hand information or rumors

[Note: Every bad review that you get should not be reported. In that case, the first option is to pacify the customers by responding timely and by using certain valuable techniques before you plunge into the ways to remove reviews from TripAdvisor.]

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4. Major Renovation/ Change of Ownership

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TripAdvisor also allows a business to remove all the past reviews only if the implemented new changes are sufficiently indicated. Some of these changes include a complete overhaul of the lobby, doubling the occupancy, having a new management, etc.
These structural changes must be clearly indicated. You can provide the following documents to support your claim:

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○ An online press release with the publication’s letterhead documenting the renovation
○ Letter from city officials or Tourist Board verifying the scope of renovation and duration of the closure
○ Building Permit from the local city/government verifying the renovation project.

[Note: Aesthetic changes like new carpet, paint, or sign do not qualify as major renovation and so will not be taken into account if the review removal request is made solely on this basis.]You can seek more help in this regard by visiting this page.

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How To Remove A Tripadvisor Review

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Make no mistake because—

89% of the consumers are not willing to book a hotel without going through reviews.

However, establishments across the line are terrified of the prospect of negative reviews and do not have a proper mechanism in place to respond to them. One of these factors is the online reputation and presence, and online reviews are perhaps one of the clearest indicators of this factor.
Online reputation is directly proportional to the quality and quantity of the reviews. Negative reviews are usually frowned upon by the majority of the businesses and they usually stay away from responding to them. Willingness to remove TripAdvisor reviews is one of the methods employed by hotels.
However, for any organization with a listing on TripAdvisor, to delete or edit TripAdvisor review is not always a viable option. Yes, TripAdvisor does not allow its listed organizations to delete negative reviews from their page. Instead, listing managers can implement either of the following two options:

a. Flag the comment/review as fake
b. Respond to the issue raised by the consumer

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How To Delete TripAdvisor Account

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The practice of listing your property on TripAdvisor hold a plethora of benefits. These include increased visibility, more bookings, more reviews from the guests, remarkable growth in popularity, increased revenue generation, and so on.

When searching for how to remove reviews from TripAdvisor, people also search for this particular query. Thus, if you are not willing to continue to enjoy the benefits that come with a TripAdvisor account then you are perhaps looking for terminating your TripAdvisor profile.

In order to delete TripAdvisor account, the following steps can be taken:

○ Visit the TripAdvisor website

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○ Log in to your account by clicking on the icon of your profile. The icon is placed on the top right corner of the homepage.

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○ On clicking the Icon of the profile, a drop-down menu will emerge. Click on the 'Account Info' option, and a page similar to the one below will appear!

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The next step requires you to find the 'Close your Account' option, which can be easily found at the bottom left corner of the page!

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The following step requires you to answer queries. Once you click on the Close your account option, a page with inquires will show up. A set of questions will appear to troubleshoot your problems.

In order to close the account permanently, at least one of the reasons need to be chosen/selected. In addition, to proceed further with your task of closing the account, search 'Close my account.' Once you find it, you need to provide/put your password to carry forward with your operation.

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○ The final step requires you to click on the 'Close my account,' which upon clicking, your account shall be deleted. However, it usually takes 3 days to completely remove activities. This process will delete your account from the mobile application.

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Delete Your Account By Sending Email

Apart from deleting your account through your website, you can also choose to delete your account through email. In order to delete your account through email, you can follow the steps below:

○ Open the email account that is registered with the account
○ Compose an email with the following mail id privacy@tripadvisor.com
○ In the subject, mention “REQUEST TO DELETE MY ACCOUNT”
○ Now compose an email regarding the willingness to delete your account
○ Click on the send button and you are done

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Useful Tips For Tripadvisor Review Removal

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1. To get a defamatory or fake review removed from your listing first, you will be required to prove that it actually violates the TripAdvisor review guidelines. Again, you will need to come armed with additional evidence to prove your point.

2. If someone is posing a malicious threat to your business, it is best to seek the help of the Aggressive and Strategic Defamation Removal Lawyers to remove reviews from TripAdvisor. Again, the attorney will help acquaint you with other content violation guidelines that you weren’t aware of before.

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How To Manage The Reviews Effectively To Avoid The Hassle Of Removal

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• Manage your reviews on an everyday basis. A Review Management Solution can come in handy to help you respond to the reviews accurately by managing them all on a single dashboard.
• Give timely responses to your reviews.
• Make your offline actions better by seeking to improve. Overhaul or renovation can influence your reputation and ranking to a great extent.

• Formulate a schedule to check your reviews
• Take your time to analyze or distinguish a fishy review from the real one.
• If fake, flag the review for removal by filling out all the necessary details appropriately.
• For further assistance, you can also seek TripAdvisor’s support by contacting them on public customer support number 1 (781) 800-5000. If a separate support number is given for your business, search for it in and around your Management Center.
• Get a Reputation Management Solution to save yourself from the peril of fake or negative reviews, thereby helping to improve your online score.

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Conclusion

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Removing a review from TripAdvisor is not an easy task and is time-consuming as the site processes over 10,000 reviews per day. But with the right technique and patience, your business will surely see the light of the day in the form of more positive reviews, thereby helping you to remove reviews from TripAdvisor for the greater good.

In fact, one of the best ways to combat negative reviews is to strive for getting more positive ones. Hence it is important to invest in a good reputation management solution that will help ease your worries to a great extent.