A high-end hotel chain with several properties on the Bay of Palma was hit by a coordinated wave of fake negative reviews on Google and TripAdvisor following an isolated labor dispute at one of its flagship hotels on the Paseo Marítimo. Within 72 hours, more than 40 one-star reviews, many from profiles with no verified stay, dragged the hotel's average rating down from 4.6 to 3.1, right at the start of peak season, when most of its annual revenue is generated.
The drop in rating immediately hurt the hotel's ranking on booking platforms, which penalize properties that fall below certain rating thresholds, and several international travel agencies with which the group had preferred-rate agreements asked for explanations before renewing their contracts for the following season.
Our team activated an accelerated reputation management protocol: we identified the reviews that violated both platforms' authenticity policies and formally reported them to Google and TripAdvisor, coordinated with the group's legal department a measured public response that explained the facts without escalating the conflict, and rolled out an active campaign requesting genuine reviews from real guests of recent months to quickly rebalance the rating. In parallel, we worked with the tour operator relations team to provide verifiable data to the agencies that had expressed concern.
Within six weeks, the average rating recovered to 4.4, more than 25 fraudulent reviews were removed from the platforms, and not a single travel agency canceled its preferred-rate agreement for the following season.
