Controversial Warere Beach hotel’s Google business profile has had a large number of reviews removed.
On April 16, 2022, a Nigerian woman wrote on Twitter about how her 23rd birthday celebrations in Zanzibar’s Warere Beach Hotel turned out to be her worst experience. According to Zainab Oladehinde, someone attempted to rape her in the assigned hotel room and made off with her $1,100.
The tweet received a lot of attention and quickly went viral throughout the world. The tweet had over 5,000 comments, 90K retweets, and 150K likes in under 24 hours.
Tweeps threatened to bring down the hotel by leaving a slew of nasty evaluations on their profiles in the comments area. Warere Beach Hotel received an average of 4.4 stars from 400 people before the story went viral. Within 10 hours, the number of reviews had risen to 12,000, with a 1.1 average rating. Within two days, the number of reviews had risen to 13.6k.
They also put a sign up that said the business was permanently closed. The official website of Warere Beach Hotel was also hacked and taken down on the same day, according to the hotel.
“Within 3 hours we received over 4,000 negative reviews on Google from people who had never stayed at our hotel”, said Warere beach in their response to the matter on Facebook.
Removing the bulk reviews.
A day later, Google erased all 13,000 bad reviews from Warere Beach’s Google business page that were related to Zainab’s tale. The total number of reviews was reduced to 214, with an average rating of 4.4 stars.
All reviews that contain obscene, profane, or offensive language or gestures are removed from business profiles by Google. Their regulations also prohibit the posting of a large number of reviews in a short period of time.
