Are you sure that it's not just down temporarily while the review is under scrutiny?

If you gave a 1 star scathing review on a property that previously had only 5-star ratings the company would be able to make a pretty good argument that your review was unreasonable and based off an unfair scenario.

As a business owner that relies heavily on TripAdvisor to validate our product I can tell you that getting a review removed is actually very difficult and not as simple as paying a small fee.

My guess is that your review was so wildly different than the rest of the reviews that it appeared to be fake. There is a new trend for customers to threaten businesses with a bad review if they don't get a reduction in price or have some other demand met and so TripAdvisor is working to combat this problem as well.

I am not saying it was fake, just that it probably looked that way. Perhaps in the future if you want to post a negative review for a business that is all 5-stars, give them 3-stars and tone down the complaint...of course I didn't read your original text so perhaps it was toned down.

Again, from the business owner's perspective, the glowing reviews on TripAdvisor are more so caused by businesses pushing happy clients to review rather than "cheating" the system...whenever we have guests who have the time of their life here we make sure to follow up with them via email a few weeks after their stay to ask them nicely to do a review for us....while we've been fortunate enough to never have had an unhappy guest we don't ask guests who are more difficult to do a review.

I can't speak for other businesses but in our case almost all of our reviews are from guests we had to remind to do it...most people forget about it 24 hours after they leave and so this is probably a big reason there are more positive reviews than negative.