Trustpilot is one of the biggest review platforms out there, with more than 330 million reviews and millions of people using it to size up businesses before they buy. But for a while now, businesses have been grumbling about how Trustpilot moderates reviews. Legitimate reviews get pulled, there’s almost zero visibility into why, and there’s mounting pressure to pay up for a subscription.
You’ll find the same story echoed in independent reports, complaint threads, and business forums: a “pay to play” pattern that makes you wonder how these platforms actually weigh fraud prevention against basic fairness.
Thrillophilia didn’t see any of this coming. Like plenty of companies that lean on customer feedback to earn trust, its Trustpilot reviews reflected real trips taken by real travelers, thousands of honest stories collected over the years.
Looking back at Thrillophilia’s history on the platform helps explain how things unraveled.
How it started
For a while, the company sat comfortably at around a 4.2 rating, gathering reviews straight from customers the normal way, inviting travelers to leave feedback after their trip, just like countless other businesses do. But after two years of steady collection and genuinely happy customers, the rating had quietly slid down to 3.6. That drop was enough to make them start asking questions.
The pitch for a paid plan
When Thrillophilia reached out to Trustpilot about the falling numbers, they were told that reviews gathered outside Trustpilot’s own invitation system were harder for the platform to automatically verify. Around that same time, conveniently, Trustpilot’s sales team showed up with an offer to upgrade to a paid plan.
Given Trustpilot’s standing and the company’s own confidence that their reviews were legitimate, they decided to go for it.
Looking back, it felt less like a partnership and more like a trap that would end up shrinking their ratings and reviews over time. The pitch promised more visibility and a healthier rating. Those benefits faded fast once the review removals kicked in.
The paid Plus plan began in August 2024, costing roughly £3,108 a year. Trustpilot’s written terms during the sales pitch assured them that reviews collected properly, following the rules, wouldn’t be taken down.
Trusting that, Thrillophilia made sure every review invite went out with a verified booking reference and PNR number attached. It even fully switched over to Trustpilot’s Automatic Feedback Service, and reviews still kept disappearing. That’s when the company sent a first, polite follow-up asking for answers.
The rating did climb back to around 4.1, but reviews kept getting pulled here and there and the numbers kept fluctuating, even though this was exactly the reliability they were paying for. Throughout 2024 and into 2025, the team filed ticket after ticket, but mostly got canned, automated replies with no real person weighing in.
Despite the back and forth, the rating held around 4.1. A screenshot from August 19, 2025 shows verified positive reviews making up 65% of more than 5,000 total reviews.
Reviews start disappearing en masse
As the second year of the subscription rolled around, positive reviews began getting wiped out fast, usually with no warning and no real explanation. This despite Trustpilot’s own earlier assurances that verified reviews were safe. Some of the deleted reviews even matched feedback the same customers had posted on Thrillophilia’s own website, yet they vanished from Trustpilot without any reason given. The company says there are thousands of examples like this.
They renewed for a second year on September 13, 2025, hoping the removals would finally stop now that they were paying customers. Instead, on October 12, 2025, Trustpilot started sending warnings claiming a chunk of their reviews were “fake” and broke platform rules.
Between October 1 and October 15, 2025, the review count fell from 5,186 to 4,644, a loss of more than 500 reviews in two weeks. That single stretch dragged the average rating down from 4.1 to 3.6, with no explanation or per-review breakdown offered despite repeated requests.
That same month, Thrillophilia handed over proof for more than 2,000 verified bookings: booking references, PNR numbers, customer details, the works. But they were told that verifying reviewers could only happen directly with the individual reviewer, which left the company with no way to know which reviews were even under suspicion, let alone defend them.
They kept pushing, reaching out 10 to 15 times across different Trustpilot teams, including Content Integrity, account managers, and senior staff, but never got a clear answer on what rule they’d supposedly broken, even though every review traced back to real traveler data.
When a reply finally came from account manager Petra Kukuckova on December 30, 2025, it didn’t spell out which guideline had been violated. It just said the company was “non-compliant” and redirected them back to the Content Integrity team, right where they’d already been stuck.
Over the following months, and despite all the evidence submitted, the rating slid further from about 3.6 down to 3.1, where it stands today. Trustpilot’s explanation was that removals and reinstatements are handled by automated systems, leaving little room for a human to step in.
Then, on May 6, 2026, Trustpilot slapped a warning on the account over alleged fake review misuse, cutting off features like review invitations, TrustBoxes, and other brand perks, even with proof of authenticity on the table.
Two years, zero answers
Over roughly 610 days, Thrillophilia kept asking for the basics: which reviews were flagged, when they were removed, and which specific rule they’d broken. None of it ever came. Follow-up messages mostly got auto-replies from support.
The audit numbers finally arrive
Nearly 20 months after the concerns were first raised, Trustpilot finally sent over an audit summary on June 10, 2026, covering September 2025 through May 2026:
- 451 reviews were reviewed
- 305 were flagged as positive
- 253 were removed for supposedly being fabricated
- That works out to an 82% fabrication rate among the positive reviews checked
- Still no review IDs or actual evidence to back any of it up
Trustpilot said the calls were based on three things: suspicious connections between reviewers, suspicious reviewer behavior, and patterns in accounts and content. But no concrete examples were offered.
Meanwhile, Thrillophilia’s public profile still showed 4,789 total reviews, with roughly 80% sitting at 4 or 5 stars, overwhelmingly positive. Yet the TrustScore stayed hidden behind a consumer warning label. The mismatch between the audit’s claims, the visible reviews, and the buried score is still unexplained.
And its not Just one Case
Review screening systems exist for good reason. They help keep the playing field fair and catch fraudulent feedback. But they’re not perfect, and sometimes legitimate reviews get caught in the net.
Thrillophilia isn’t alone here. Other businesses and outside investigators have raised similar red flags about Trustpilot’s moderation. In December 2024, investment research firm Grizzly Research put out a report called The Trustpilot Mafia, arguing that the platform’s business model creates incentives that can actually work against the companies it’s supposed to help. Among its claims: businesses often see ratings drop, reviews disappear without explanation, and mounting pressure to pay for a subscription just to stay visible.
The Telegraph ran its own investigation in December 2025, documenting multiple businesses describing the same pattern: reviews pulled with no clear reason, followed by a sales push to upgrade or renew, with no real way to challenge the platform’s calls.
On top of that, a verified 2026 complaint filed with the Better Business Bureau described an almost identical experience: a business said Trustpilot wouldn’t manually review the evidence they submitted, treating their automated system as the final word, and the business was even locked out of its paid Pro dashboard. The BBB confirmed the complaint independently.
There’s also an active Reddit community, r/trustpilotcomplaints, filled with similar stories about businesses feeling squeezed into paid plans they can’t seem to escape.
All of this points to a bigger industry question. How do you balance fraud prevention with fairness and due process when real customer feedback gets challenged? And why does trust in genuine reviews seem to hinge on whether you’re a paying customer?
Still waiting for answers
For Thrillophilia, this was never really about invoices or individual reviews. It’s about the years of hard work and trust that went into building a reputation, and having that credibility undermined despite following every rule Trustpilot laid out.
If a company does everything right, plays by the rules, verifies every booking, avoids any violations, and still ends up in this position, something in the process clearly isn’t working the way it should.
All they’re asking for now is the evidence behind Trustpilot’s decisions and an independent look at what happened to their account. More than anything, they want a transparent, accountable way for businesses to push back on moderation calls, especially when those calls directly shape how customers see a company’s credibility.
Every review, to them, represents a real trip and a real relationship built on trust, and protecting that matters not just for the business, but for the travelers who put their faith in it. They’re hoping Trustpilot will finally provide real evidence and make things right after everything they’ve paid for.