While booking accommodation for our trip Ally and I have relied extensively on hotel reviews from TripAdvisor; many, if not most, of our accommodation decisions are made with at least some reference to the site.

Tripadvisor, if you are not familiar with the site, allows guests to rate and review hotels in which they have stayed, and these reviews and rankings are one of the easiest ways to compare accommodation options in any particular city. VirtualTourist is a similar site, and many hotel booking sites (such as AsiaRooms and Expedia) have integrated user reviews into their booking engines.

These types of user-generated reviews are incredibly useful because the volume of reviews give a broad sample of experiences of all aspects of the hotel and they are written by ordinary, paying guests. Hoteliers appear to be well aware of the increasing reliance travelers are placing on TripAdvisor reviews, as is clear by the many hotels which take the opportunity offered by TripAdvisor respond to complaints or criticisms.

How TripAdvisor deals with reviews is crucial to its credibility. The blog Elliot suggests a critical review of a hotel in Minneapolis has simply, well, disappeared. You can read the full details over at Elliot, but the facts as they are portrayed by there are that a negative review, mostly concerning a restaurant connected to a hotel in Minneapolis, was posted to TripAdvisor, the hotel responded to the reviewer fully and explained its position and asked the reviewer to consider reviewing or deleting her review. The reviewer considered doing so, but later found that all traces the controversial review had vanished, as if it had never been posted. Every hotel has the ability to respond to reviews on TripAdvisor – it is unclear whether this hotel sought to do so.

Similarly, it is not clear whether the hotel ever contacted TripAdvisor, or that TripAdvisor was in any way responsible for removing the review at issue. I hope TripAdvisor make some sort of response about the alleged disappearance. It would be disturbing for a review to simply disappear (unless where there appears no good reason to think it was fabricated or malicious. Whether or not anything untoward has happened here, the transparency of sites like TripAdvisor is sure to become a talking point in the future, as all such sites walk a fine line between the basically anonymous (and generally unsubstantiated) praise and gripes of reviews and the hotel industry who the buy the advertisements (or pay the commissions).
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