It’s official, I am addicted to the marvellous prosumer site Tripadvisor.
It seems impossible for me to stay in a hotel, visit an attraction, eat a meal or even look at a view, without getting on the laptop and tap tapping away at a review!
From local cafes and restaurants to wonders of the world, I’ve analysed, sized up, cogitated and commented on it.
These days I never book a hotel, trip or b and b without sizing it up on the great TA first. It generally works like this:
1. pick the places we want to see,
2. decide how much we want to spend
3. check out the top rated accommodation on Tripadvisor.
4. gradually go down and down (and sometimes down again) the list until we find the best hotels that we can manage on our meagre budget.
5. Then it’s onto various hotel booking sites to find the cheapest deal and hey presto – booked!
It’s never failed me yet and I’ve yet to stay in a bad hotel thanks to my diligent research.
Obviously there’s been a lot of talk about fake reviews, competitors leaving bad comments on their rival’s sites and people threatening to leave bad reviews unless they get freebies / upgrades etc.
However it’s usually easy enough to weed out the fakers, if there’s 100s of brilliant reviews and then a couple of dire ones then I always take a look at the other reviews done by the people who are complaining.
Often there are no other reviews or they have only recently joined the site, whereas most genuine reviewers will have at least a few other contributions.
In-case you’re interested, here’s my contributions to date (316 so far!!) tripadvisor.