The first instance of this was in 2019, when I stayed in an ultra cheap motel on the outskirts of Kingsland, Georgia. It was very late at night and I had been on the road all day long driving down the Eastern Seaboard. I just needed somewhere to turn in, and reasonably priced options were few in number. Despite my reservations, I narrowed my choices down to one of two fairly cheap motels in the area, knowing that staying at either of the two options would be taking a bit of a risk. Nevertheless, the prices being advertised were low and my total expenditures to that point had really added up, so I made my decision and booked the room just before heading over what would have to be home for the night.
Upon my arrival, things seemed adequate inside the lobby, and the woman at the check in desk was pleasant enough. Unfortunately, my room was a different story. I walked inside to discover not just a very nasty bathtub, but (more concerningly) a serious safety issue thanks to the destroyed safety latch by my room's door. I returned to the lobby and asked for a different room, one which turned out to have a sketchy inside door handle, non-working heater, and a non-working toilet. This was the only other room available, and it reeked throughout with the smell of bad water pipes. Needless to say, that night wasn't the best one I've ever spent in a motel, and the motel itself was one of the worst I've had the misfortune of staying in.1 I posted a negative review on the Booking.com website about my stay and went on about my business. But some time later, while reminiscing online about my trip, I found to my surprise that my now showed in my history as having been "rejected!" How do you "reject" a review after it was already posted live to the website and has even gotten an upvote from another user? Something was up here, and it wasn't good.
In 2021, I had my second experience with one of my reviews being "rejected." It was during the time of COVID-19 related travel restrictions, and though restrictions within the U.S. had been lifted, border crossings into Canada were still dicey and, while possible, a major pain in the rear to arrange with full inter-provincial travel still not a viable option. I opted to stay within the Lower 48 and head mostly west, crossing my remaining unvisited desert and Rocky Mountain area sates off the list before finishing in the Midwest. By the end of my first day on the road, I had driven all the way from Dallas to Albuquerque and was looking for somewhere to put up for the night. Albuquerque options were too expensive for that early in the road trip, and I booked a place an hour onward in the town of Grants, New Mexico. I'll let my review speak to what transpired upon my arrival at the motel:
This was in a very real sense a far more egregious experience than my stay in Georgia one had been, because this time the potential of real and immediate danger was involved. I wrote and posted an extremely negative review on the Booking.com website, only to see it stuck in a "pending" status for some time before finally receiving notification that it has been "rejected." This time, though, I wasn't having it. I dug around online and located a customer service number for Booking.com, and called it demanding to know why my review had been removed. After some time, the representative told me that it was because I hadn't actually stayed at the motel (Booking.com's content guidelines state "We can review an accommodation that you booked through Booking.com if you stayed there, or if you arrived at the accommodation but didn't actually stay there"). I wasn't about to let that go, and following an angry confrontation I managed to get my review reinstated. As of July 2023 it was still on the website, though you had to really dig to find it due to it having been nearly two years since it was posted. As of this writing an additional year later, the review has been archived and is no longer accessible due to the site's policy on archiving reviews. Nevertheless, I have now ensured it lives on on the internet with its inclusion in this blog post. This is not the kind of thing that should be just swept under the rug.
From my experience, it seems that Booking.com has some kind of problem with critical reviews, or at least with some of them. You can say whatever you like if it's positive or neutral, and your review will be approved straightaway, but if you report useful information that's too critical, your review may be rejected, even after having previously been approved and displayed on the site. Since I started writing this blog post last summer, a third review has been taken down by the Powers That Be at the site, one which appeared to be live a year after having been posted but which was subsequently yanked. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt on that one and assume they took issue with my use of the word "deceptive" as potentially libelous, but if this was an issue, the review never should have gone live in the first place. I don't know if this was actually the reason for the review being taken down and am just speculating. I can't help but wonder whether some reviews get removed at the behest of lodgings that advertise on their site. Whatever the reasoning, the rejection and removal of my two earlier reviews calls into question the entire trustworthiness of their ratings aggregation system, for me at least. I have stopped contributing reviews to the site, and for my recent road trip up to Alaska and back I made use of other online services to book some of my rooms. Based on one other blog post I've since found, this may be a more prudent policy moving forward.