What are incentivized reviews? A guide for business owners

The most reliable way to build your online reputation on platforms like Tripadvisor is to get more reviews. The more reviews – especially positive ones – you have for your businesses, the more likely you’ll increase your rating and your visibility on the platform. 

Most business owners already know that you can’t fake or pay your way to the top when it comes to reviews. The only way to get more reviews on your page is to ask your guests and diners for them. Easy, right?

Not quite. The way you ask for reviews is important.

As opposed to other platforms, we do allow business owners to ask for reviews but we simply do not allow them to associate any sort of incentives with it.

At Tripadvisor, we have a large, global team working 24/7 and dedicated to ensuring the integrity of our platform. In 2022, they removed more than 1.3 million fake and paid reviews — with nearly three quarters removed before ever making it onto the platform.

One type of review our moderators frequently remove as a result of violating our community guidelines? Incentivized reviews. In fact, this year we’ve removed or blocked over 120,000 reviews for violations on this policy and penalized over 1,500 businesses.

In this post, we’ll talk through what incentivized reviews are, why they’re not allowed on the platform, and what it all means for your business:

What are incentivized reviews?

An incentivized review is any review submitted to Tripadvisor that is connected in any way to the offer or promise of a benefit. We prohibit all types of incentive offers.

This includes, but is not limited to:

• Tangible items, such as a free drink at a restaurant or free WiFi at a hotel.
• Intangible benefits, such as a discount on a bill or a room upgrade.
• Offers with no guaranteed benefit, such as entry into a raffle or contest.

Our prohibition on incentive offers also encompasses what we refer to as “employee incentive programs,” in which employees of the business listed on our site, rather than reviewers, are incentivized. This includes, but is not limited to, behavior such as:

• Requiring employees to recruit a certain quota of reviews in a given time period (including rewarding them if they do so and/or penalizing them if they do not)
• Intangible benefits, such as a discount on a bill or a room upgrade.
• Providing employees with any kind of bonus, special treatment, or other reward for being mentioned in a review, or a certain number of reviews.

This means that anytime you ask a guest or diner for a review, there can be no strings attached. No free drink, no late check-out, no raffle or t-shirt giveaway, no bonus for the server with the most reviews. If you ask for a review, you can’t offer anything in exchange except for the standard experience of staying at your property, enjoying the experiences that your tours offer, or dining at your restaurant.

Why aren’t incentivized reviews allowed on Tripadvisor?

At first glance, it may seem innocuous to offer something in exchange for a review. We know how challenging it is to get your guests to go from “I had a great time!” to actually sharing their experience at your hotel or restaurant online. Tripadvisor is a trusted source for millions of travelers due to enforcement of this policy and others that uphold the integrity of our reviews.

At Tripadvisor, we allow organic reviews about real travel experiences. That’s it.

What happens when a business violates Tripadvisor’s incentivized review policy?

Incentivized reviews fall under our Trust and Safety fraud policies and consequently are a violation of our Content Fraud guidelines. As a result, businesses found to be violating these guidelines will have any incentivized reviews removed and their rankings will be temporarily downgraded. Removals due to confirmed or suspected violations of our guidelines can also disqualify a business from receiving awards, such as Traveler’s Choice and Best of the Best.

Repeated violations may result in a large red penalty badge being placed on the offending business’s Tripadvisor listing page.

What should I do if I know or suspect that another business is offering incentives?

Please reach out to our Investigations team by emailing incentives@tripadvisor.com with any concerns, questions, or proof of incentives you may have. We will look into each and every report we receive.

Keep Tripadvisor the world’s most trusted travel platform

Thank you for taking the time to read this and for being a valuable member of our community. We know with your help and cooperation we can continue to keep Tripadvisor the world’s most trusted travel platform.

For more information on how we protect Tripadvisor’s integrity, take a look at our latest Review Transparency Report.