I used to work at TripAdvisor AMA

[Mariagatzs12]

As the title says :) more than 7 years there!

Would you trust the rating system when choosing accomodation ?

How do you weed out malicious reviews?

They have actual people working there? I thought it was 99.9% automated? Do you work from home?:

Yes an no. Blatant fake reviews are easy to spot. Some might have been given incentives by the accomodation. Those ones are harder to track. (That's penalised within the TA system btw). I usually check the score and read the top positive and top negative ones and that usually give you a fairly decent idea. IME the vast majority of reviews are genuine.

Yes mostly is automated. Flagged reviews get seen by a human in call centre type places.

Can an owner ask for a comment to be removed?

I read (a very long) one recently and to be honest the reviewer sounded like a complete pain in the backside - demanding glass after glass of wine because they were all bad (even though I know the place and the owner is a sommelier so I can’t imagine he’d have a cellar of crap wine). They then complained that they were comped the wine but not the whole meal! Then they said he was rude and horrible for not kissing their backsides! He is actually a very nice man.

I love TA

My current favourite pastime is watching four in a bed and reading the TA reviews as each couple hosts

Time on my hands

I always think it's unfair when folk review say a hotel, but have only been for an afternoon tea or a coffee.

They leave a scathing load of blurb and then state 'can't comment on the actual hotel as didn't stay there'

Owners cannot remove reviews if they're genuine. They can get them removed if they can prove that whatever the review is saying didn't happen or they're blackmailing the owner.

For those about "I only had afternoon tea" a new listing would be created and then the hotel rating wouldn't be affected. It's up to the owner to report this.

I wish there were a way to reply to stupid responses from owners. I made a fair review of a new chef in my local pub (he was awful), and was accused of being friends with the old one so my review was apparently "fake".

Nope, just able to tell the difference between a competent chef and an incompetent cook.

The owner of that place made many deeply unprofessional remarks in response to any criticism, it was dreadful.

@cornish unfortunately that's not allowed. The idea is that users aren't stupid and will be able to see when owners are being total idiots. You can reference an owner's response but you can't write a direct reply.