Removing reviews on Tripadvisor and Trustpilot: how their rules differ from Google's

Hotels and restaurants live on Tripadvisor; service businesses and online shops live on Trustpilot. Both platforms remove reviews, both have a process, and both processes are different from Google's. Owners who apply the Google approach to them mostly get rejections.

Tripadvisor

Tripadvisor's model is one review per person per experience, written about a genuine visit. The platform runs a fraud team that is mostly looking for paid reviews and review-boosting, but it does also handle owner reports.

What is removable:

• Reviews that do not describe a first-hand experience ("my friend went and said...").
• Second reviews of the same visit, or reviews posted to update an earlier one instead of editing it.
• Reviews from a competitor, an employee, or someone with a dispute unrelated to a guest experience.
• Reviews about a different property (frequent with similar names).
• Reviews containing hate speech, threats, personal information, or that are primarily about a legal dispute.
• Reviews that mention a refund demand in exchange for the review being changed; Tripadvisor calls this blackmail and takes it seriously. Report it immediately and keep the message.
• Reviews from people who were not guests: for example someone who was refused a reservation, or who only called.

What is not removable: a genuine guest who disliked the stay. Also, Tripadvisor does not remove a review because the guest later had their complaint resolved; only the guest can edit or delete.

How to report: from the Management Centre, open the review, choose "Report a review", pick the reason, and write the explanation in the box. Be specific, as with Google: dates, what you checked, why the person could not have been a guest. If you get a rejection, you can reply to the email with more evidence; Tripadvisor does re-examine.

The owner response on Tripadvisor is more visible than on Google, shown directly under the review in full. Readers of hotel reviews actually read responses. Write them with that in mind: calm, specific, a sentence on what changed, a name.

Trustpilot

Trustpilot works differently. The business cannot remove a review, but it can flag it. When flagged, Trustpilot asks the reviewer to provide proof of their experience (an order number, a receipt, an email). If the reviewer does not respond within a set period, the review is taken down. If they do, Trustpilot assesses the proof and either keeps the review or removes it.

Flag reasons that work:

• No genuine experience (the reviewer is not a customer; ask for proof).
• Harmful or illegal content.
• Personal information.
• Not about this business.
• Advertising or promotional content.
• Written by a competitor or employee.

Flag only when you have doubts about the experience; flagging every negative review shows in your business's public transparency report on Trustpilot and reads badly. Each business profile displays how many reviews were flagged and how many were removed.

Replies on Trustpilot are public and permanent. Same rules as everywhere: thank, acknowledge, say what you did, offer a direct contact. Trustpilot also lets you request a review from customers through its own invitation tools, which is the compliant way to build volume there.

Yelp, TheFork, Booking.com in one paragraph each

Yelp has an aggressive automatic filter that hides a large share of reviews on its own, including good ones. Owners can report reviews for policy violations; the categories are similar to Google's. Yelp is small in most of Europe; prioritise it only if your customers use it.

TheFork only allows reviews from guests who booked through TheFork and showed up, so fake reviews are rare. Report through the restaurant manager interface if a review is clearly about another visit or contains abuse.

Booking.com reviews are tied to a stay. The property can report reviews that break the guidelines (abuse, personal data, not about the stay), and can post a public reply. The review score is also affected by which categories guests rate, which you cannot change, so the reply and the operational fix are your levers.

The EU route when a platform refuses: the Digital Services Act

Since February 2024, every online platform operating in the EU has to provide a way to notify illegal content and to respond with a reasoned decision. Google, Tripadvisor, Trustpilot and Booking.com all have a DSA notice form. This is for content that is illegal under the law of an EU member state, not for content that merely breaks the platform's own rules: defamation, published personal data, threats, discriminatory abuse.

Three things make a DSA notice stronger than a normal report:

• The platform has to tell you what it decided and why.
• You can appeal internally, and then take it to an out-of-court dispute body certified under the DSA.
• Repeat refusals go to the national Digital Services Coordinator, which is a regulator, not a help desk.

It is slower than a policy report and you should not use it for ordinary negative reviews. For a review that falsely accuses a clinic of malpractice or names a waiter as a thief, it is the right tool, alongside the normal report.

Priorities for a multi-platform business

1. Google first; it is where decisions are made.
2. Tripadvisor second for restaurants and hotels; a rating there is visible in Google search results.
3. Trustpilot for anything that sells online or by subscription.
4. Monitor the rest; reply to everything everywhere.

A single feed with every new review from all platforms, and a status for every report, is what makes this manageable for a business with more than one location. That is what the Renomy dashboard does, and the free audit is where we count, per platform, what can actually be reported on your profiles.