I work with a small hotel in Mazatlan, Mexico, and we recently noticed that some crazy things have been happening with the listings in TripAdvisor.

We first noticed when our listing suddenly disappeared, and we realized we weren’t the only one. Previously there were 69 hotels listed in Mazatlan, now there are only 50. The interesting thing is that we along with several of the others that were dropped were in the top 10 of the popularity index.

A little later on we showed up again in TripAdvisor, but listed under Specialty Lodging and with a different variation of our name, and all of our history of reviews, our photos, info, etc. was gone.

Has this happened anywhere else? Could anybody give me an idea of what’s going on and how best to deal with this?

Many thanks!

fluctuation is ordinary thing, You need not to worry about that. Its happening with others also. Soon your probs will resolve.

Tripadvisor will probably just be re-categorising

Actually, sites such as Tripadvisor, Yelp, Google Places etc. pull data from something called the N.A.P. which simply stands for Name Address and Phone Number. It is like a huge database of our business information. You will want to claim this information and keep it consistent.
Some resources you will find helpful: http://www.localeze.com/ and http://www.locallytype.com/pages/submit.htm#dataprous