Damn you and Alex for keeping this discussion alive – I’m up to my tookus in deadlines, when all I want to do is sit down with the two of you and discuss this all day long!

That Turkey hotel thing is so typical of the problem with hotel reviews. Someone who’s like, “It’s my first time in Europe and the hotel was awful” because the shower was weird, or there were two twin beds pushed together instead of, say, American big luxe beds – UGH.

There is no context, no frame of reference. That’s why objective expert content is so crucial – you could say instead,”OK, I went down and checked out the hotel. Here’s the deal. It’s perfectly fine, it’s clean, and they seem really nice.

The rooms have two twin beds pushed together. This is normal in (whatever country) for (whatever star hotel).” Or, “If you’re used to shiny new Marriotts, this might not be the hotel for you. It’s 350 years old, and sometimes it shows. But the rooms are clean..” etc.

OH, I could go on and on. For someone not in the travel industry per se, I have about a million ideas.

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Well hopefully the pendulum is swinging back. Of course we should trust trusted sources. Of course we should be leery of other sources. Of course.

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I usually contribute a review to TripAdviser after staying in a new (to me) hotel and have found reviews there to be useful when choosing an hotel in an unfamiliar location – on one condition. I always, always look at the travel history of the reviewer to get an idea of their profile and travelling experience. A simple, cheap hotel will often score way higher than an internationally renowned starred place because a traveller not expecting much may be surprised and delighted, whereas someone paying top dollar will expect the world (with knobs on) and will feel miffed if it doesn’t deliver.

So, I temper customer written reviews with a bit of common sense, read as many as I can to get some kind of balanced view and appreciate the small points which many make but which often get overlooked by the travel guides. In addition, the information shared online is often far more current than a two or three year old guidebook – I’d rather have an opinion formed last week than a couple of years ago.

We should read everything with caution, be it from a “professional” guide or from mere amateurs such as me. But I have no axe to grind, simply happy to share my experience and opinions with others in return for theirs.

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I once looked up a hotel where I worked as a housekeeper. I noticed that a lot of the comments were way of the mark because people made generalizations about the hotel based on the room they stayed in. For instance, one review said the rooms weren’t spacious enough. From the pictures they provided, I could see they stayed in a standard room (which is a standard size not a suite, duh!). It stands to reason that if you book the cheapest room in the hotel, you aren’t going to get the biggest room or the most amenities — but that doesn’t mean that they’re not available.

Most of the reviews about the hotel were very positive — glowing in fact. If I hadn’t worked there and seen the conditions for myself, I would have thought they were paid advertising or something.

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I don’t think you can get good user-based reviews if the users aren’t familiar with what the regional standards are. I don’t know that I’ve ever stayed in a hotel in Mexico where the mattress wasn’t as hard as a rock. Now that I live here, I know that it’s not just the mattresses but the sofas and chairs too. You cannot purchase furniture that will not bruise your ass when you sit down. Likewise for comments about places looking “run down.” The humidity and tropical weather wrecks havoc on paint and metal making even the nicest places look a bit shabby during certain times of the year. I’ve found that most reviewers are comparing apples and oranges; foreign properties against American standards. It’s not accurate or fair, IMO.

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Good point Robin, and yet the problem is that many people reading the reviews will be doing the same thing, comparing apples and oranges. So in some ways, that kind of review is precisely what those people need to hear, because it will help them understand the hotel better.

The greatest challenge is how to know when a reviewer’s expectations line up with mine. Because if their expectations are similar to mine, then I know that their review will be more valid for me personally. On the other hand, if they hold wildly different expectations about the places they stay at, then I pretty much have to discredit their review.

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Darren, I find that many of the most vociferous reviews are from first timers, eager to share their experiences as a result of something out of the ordinary, as far as they are concerned. The more considered, perhaps rather more tempered comments are usually written by travellers with a few more miles and hotel nights under their belt.

Opinions also vary as a result of the reviewer’s normal travel pattern. Someone staying in a budget hotel as a rule will have quite a different outlook on a five-star, full service hotel and vice versa. With Trip A it’s easy to look up the review history of the writer – it’s a feature that’s always been there.

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I would never think to check a reviewer’s past reviews. Maybe some kind of legend for each reviewer, as a quick look-see, which would tell the reader important stuff.

sex, age range, marital status
who did you go with on this trip? (number of people and category of people)
some indicator of their travel experience. number of countries visited in lifetime? number of trips taken during some time period?

Or maybe not a legend, but some way to answer questions that would feed to the review an op-ed-bio-length sentence: “Jane is a woman in her 40s who has traveled extensively. She went on this trip with her family.”

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Hi Darren
Not sure I suggested a “score” specifically.

CUGC (Consumer User Generated Content) ought to be distinguished between expert agent content. A score indicates something indiscrete – but this is a discrete choice.

Content sites are not ebay – you are not building a relationship with a single reviewer (unlike on an auction site where you are buying from someone unknown (or selling to)). It is the aggregate information that is most interesting for usefulness – but individual reviews can be infotainment….. (but less useful)

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I use trip advisor a lot to read reviews, write my own and ask people questions on the forum.

I have to say that I do take everything with a pince of salt. I am lucky that I get to see a few hotels in the year so know what standard things should be. I do not review a travelodge in the same way I would review a 5 star hotel. They are just not comparable. I try to write facts instead of feeling. Say what I saw etc, rather than my personal view on the place. I try to write what I would like to read myself.

I would not ever stop using them, there are some brilliant destination experts on there that have helped me no end! But I think people can become too dependent on them! However, if a hotel has bad review after bad review then its generally going to be a bad hotel and I wouldnt go there to prove it otherwise!

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Well done Darren for a headline that draws people in but doesn’t back it up with facts. You really are becoming a media title.

I would argue that Tripadvisor’s 30 million unique users a month might suggest that consumers DO trust user generated content.

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Hi Kevin,
Nooo….. the trip advisor content is entertainment! (infotainment)
Its fun to read when you are thinking about your trip as it puts you into “travel mode”.
UGC content sites have “framed” the discussion around trust (like I have in a way) but no one ever talks about the entertainment value of dreaming of your forthcoming trip. “Get me out of my cubicle for 10 minutes a day”
I would love to have a research budget to look into this kind of thing……

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Alex: If tripadvisor was simply review entertainment it wouldn’t get 30M views a month surely?

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Darren: Try Uptake.com for starters.

What we are all talking about here in this discussion is Amazon for travel.

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Tripadvisor, I thought, was quite good. As long as you temper what is written with one’s own knowledge. I tend to use it as a guide if I am not too sure about something and take an average from what has been written (if enough has been written, of course). Usually one can spot (at least I can) the “planted” comments eg. (extreme example) the comment about some hotel in North Korea that was branded as very good with the only complaint being that there was no picture of the “Dear leader” in the Karzi!!

Anyway, dare I say this, if you want some advice on places, you could, er, try a travel agent. Here, what the clerk is supposed to do is ask questions about what you like and what your aspirations are and then, using his or her knowledge (and that of his or her colleagues) make sensible reccommendations. Bit old hat, I know, but it used to work remarkably well.

Anyway, I suppose all these travel commentary sites et al do at least keep a few travel writers off the dole – especially those not in the travel business per se…..

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@Eric: Perhaps everyone is comparing apples and oranges but when you take into account that ALL of the beds in Mexico are like concrete, then what do you do? Go camping? Visit Costa Rica instead? What you have is a number of negative reviews of perfectly nice hotels by people with no previous knowledge of Mexico. Yes, the beds are hard and the paint was peeling off the ceiling in the bathroom or whatever (you should see MY house now at the end of rainy season!) but other than that the service is excellent, the pool was clean, etc… people tend to give more attention to and focus on negatives than positives.

@Murray: If the PR person is any good, you won’t be able to spot their plugs. Between paid “reviews” and uneducated tourists, I don’t put much stock in User Content. I’m not the only person who feels this way AND it isn’t isolated to travel either. People rely on word of mouth more than even professional experts (remember the Lonely Planet brouhaha?).

So for me, in order of importance, I would:
1) Ask friends/family who have gone before
2) Check a guidebook for possibilities (assuming that the trip warranted a book purchase or if one was available)
3) Verify THAT information on local forums.

Here in Vallarta, there are a huge numbers of people who return year after year and are active on the forums. Between them and the snowbirds who put friends and family up in hotels when they visit, there is a lot of information written by people who know what they are talking about.

I don’t have time to sift through 250 reviews of a hotel on TripAdvisor. Take into account that I would consider a small percent of those relevant and I have even less time. It would be more helpful to me that, instead of bios for reviewers, that sites like TA did the sifting and showed me a nice graph. 45% of the reviews said the hotel has hard beds. 22% said the hotel was shabby. 66% said the pool was clean, etc… now how they would do that and make it feasable for their business, that’s another story. Oh and get rid of the illiterate, nonsensical reviews…”the resterrant was tiny and they only spoek MEXICAN!!!!! LOLOLOL”
Sigh.

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I don’t know that I’d read a bio of reviewers, or identify with a “type” of traveler, but I’m much more likely to trust a user-generated review that says WHY they liked or didn’t like something (i.e., the beds were hard, the water never got warm, the staff was super friendly, room 201 is upstairs from the nightclub & really loud) – it’s that kind of thing that helps me determine whether those things would bother me or make me want to stay there, not just someone saying “this place is great” with no information about what “great” means.

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Hey Robin,

I get your point. I guess that’s one of the problems with user reviews – a user may have no idea how the hotel stacks up against other hotels in town, so they can’t offer a balanced view. That’s the flaw with amateur reviews. But then, why would family and friends’ opinions be any better? Most of the time, they’re still “amateur” reviewers.

As imperfect as they are, user reviews have the potential to offer something similar to friends and family recommendations: firsthand knowledge from someone with a similar level of travel experience. Imperfect, yes. But completely useless? No.

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@Eric

At least with my friends and family, I know who has similar tastes, their background in traveling in that region, etc… there’s more information for me to judge their review on.

It’s true that nothing is perfect except firsthand experience. I agree with Jessica that reviews that say “XYZ was great,” are not helpful at all. Why was it great or horrible? I would never say that user reviews are completely worthless just that I personally, am not willing to invest the time in sifting through the crap to get to something I can use. There are faster and more accurate ways.

Vallarta gets 2-3 million visitors a year and a significant portion (if I had to estimate, I’d say at least 50%) are happy buying souvenirs from Wal-Mart and then going to Senor Frog’s for overpriced margaritas. And that’s fine for them BUT I don’t want them giving me travel advice.

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Darren, I think that’s what’s going to need to happen. It would be great to log into a site like TripAdvisor, give them your preferences, then have the site use that information to order the reviews according to your preferences. Like Robin pointed out, with friends and family you know more about their preferences and travel experience. The task for user generated sites is to mirror that kind of firsthand advice as much as possible through user reviews.

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@Darren YES exactly. I don’t care about the same things that a family of six cares about. Nor do I have the same needs or preconceived notions as a senior couple traveling for the first time. I would totally trust reviewers more if I knew they were in my general demographic.

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Long time reader, first time commenter (I’ve always wanted to say that)

I am the Berlin local expert for PlanetEye and I have to admit that it has coloured my view of user reviews. I used to trawl through TripAdvisor and the like when booking hotels and take their advice to heart, often being quite positively surprised when I arrived at the hotel. Now that I see what kind of input I have for Berlin, compared to those that flew in for a few days and left again, I’m far more for expert opinions. Miss Expatria and Robin’s comments were spot on: a review is true only for certain values of truth.

That said, I’ll now throw out the opposite: how good are my reviews for an American who’s never left the country before? What I say is great and normal may disappoint them because their expectations do not correlate to the local ones.

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both types should do very well indeed. Just like this blog. We have an expert who picks the topis and starts a discussion and users who share their opinions making this place a useful place on the Web.

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@Darren: Yes, that would be better. Combine that with a summary of the comments (and not just stars or smiley faces but an actual breakdown) and I might actually use it. For me, it’s not just about the quality of reviews, it’s about the time I have to spend to find useful ones.

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Didn’t see an invite winging it’s way to me Darren but i’ll forgive you!

I think you’re all spot in coming up with the conclusion that review sites are much more powerful when the review comes from somebody like you or someone who’s opinion you trust above others (as possibl

One thing I would throw in here from my own experience running Holidays Uncovered is that to get profile information you need to get profile information – sounds obvious but it’s not that simple to just collect information. Many people just want to write about their holiday for ten mins, get it off their chest and then they may never interact with their chosen review site until next year. To collect meaningful and viable user profile data from them on top of the 10 or so minutes for engagement they’ve already given is hard – especially as many people are cynical that the information is going to be used for marketing purposes. This is an inherent barrier in developing a review site (message board essentially) into a powerful inspirational community that people keep visiting (even when next year’s holiday is a blip on the radar).

Things we’re working towards on Holidays Uncovered are:

1) To collect more information (openly and honestly)
2) To make reviews as relevant as possible using that information.
3) To provide multi layers of engagement for different types of users, those who just want to read, those who just want to type (you’d be surprised) and those who want to engage with the ‘community’ frequently.

I like to use the phrase that Clay Shirky uses in his book ‘Here Comes Everybody’, we are now in a situation where things are ‘published and then filtered’ – the key development for review sites is to get the right filters in the right places for the right users.

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Hello Darren and readers,

You’ve brought up an excellent topic that definitely drives some attention among the travel experts and consumers. I thought I should give my view on the subject on video (recorded last night). Have a look at http://www.hotel-blogs.com. Cheers and see you next month at the TravelBlogCamp. Is it full now? Guillaume

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I’m currently look to buy a small hotel in the UK so I have been reading Tripadvisor’s reviews very carefully — those of the hotels for sale and those of the competition. Negatives in the reviews usually tell things about the buildings I need to know — paper thin walls, not enough hot water etc. They also often tell the real reason why the hotel is for sale. Sometimes, especially if the owner is selling after just a couple of years, there are negative comments about how it’s run.
I have stopped reading overly positive reviews — it’s really interesting how many of them are written by someone who seems to know about all the guest rooms and registered and posted once and have not logged on ever again…
If I am contemplating staying at a new hotel, I prefer to look at booking site reviews (where you have had to book in order to post) they seem more trustworthy.

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