TripAdvisor responded to me earlier posted questions for the tripadvisor hotel relations team.  They did not respond directly to some of the more esoteric questions, pontificating on social media.  But they did provide some useful information that I am sure many hoteliers are clamouring for.

The main juxt of my questioning was whether owners use profiles like normal users, and who is allowed to be a management respondent.  I am surprised by some of the info.  Especially potential ethical violations of hotel owners.. swapping good reviews or shill review for their property, or against a competitor.

Their response to the above link was as follows:

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Dear Michael,

Thank you for your email and questions regarding the site.

Can you please tell me the title and date of the review the management response which you would like to edit is attached to?

Yes, your owner account is the same as a user account. We do not have restrictions for owner features, it is all up to what you want your preferences to be.

Even though you are using your TripAdvisor account to write management responses you are also able to post reviews for other listings under the same user name if you desire.

Anyone representing a property is able to write a management response for a review.

Though I cannot go into great detail about how we sift out questionable material, I can tell you that TripAdvisor invests a great deal of energy and resources into separating out the wheat from the chaff, so to speak.  Aside from employing the use of a set of automatic filters to constantly scan both published and incoming reviews for suspicious behavior, we also manually inspect each post before it is published to our site.  Beyond that, we respond to every piece of support correspondence that we receive from both hoteliers and our members.  If you ever find a piece of content on our site to be fishy, please do not hesitate to drop us a line.  I think that you’ll find out support team quite responsive to your concerns.

Unfortunately we are unable to reveal any statical data about reviewer history throughout the site.

In order for us to best serve our community, we like to rely on e-mail correspondence for customer support issues as opposed to phone support. 

Please let us know if you have any other questions or concerns.

Take Care,

TripAdvisor Hotel Relations Team

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I am writing a slough of management responses for hotels, and note that my consistent, patterned behaviour of responding, and including my email, has just been bounced at the door.

After writing something along the lines of 20-30 replies, the submission team has rejected my responses for having an email.

These sort of jagged inconcistensies are going to be problematic long run.

However, they are REALLY F*?!*#$ annoying when you are simply trying to do your job.