Using Tripadvisor Reviews

One of my absolute favorite websites of all time is www.tripadvisor.com. If you travel at all, you will want to be familiar with this site. Whenever we are planning a trip, we visit this site religiously to check up on reviews and forum posts.

I can't even begin to list all the things you can do on this site, but one of the things we use it for most is to read reviews, more specifically hotel reviews. When you are travelling to a place you have never been before, especially to a foreign country, you want to be sure that you are staying somewhere that not only looks nice in the pictures on the website, but that also meets your standards in reality. If you have ever stayed in a sub-par hotel, you know exactly what I mean!

Perhaps the easiest way to find reviews of hotels is to sort them the way it makes the most sense to you. You can choose a category (All Hotels, Best Value, Family, Luxury, Business, and Romantic) and then click the drop-down menu to sort the hotels by ranking or price. You can also select various options for your search, such as type of accommodation (hotel, B&Bs, specialty lodging, etc.), specific price range, or neighborhood (if you know what area you would like to stay in). The list that comes up should tell you what the accommodations' rankings are (for example: #24 out of #462 hotels in Nashville, etc.). You can view your options in list view or opt for a larger map that you can click on to view information about hotels in specific areas of the city you are researching. Of course, if you already know which hotel or accommodation you are considering, you can always simply search for that hotel by name and it should come up.

In popular and widely travelled cities, you will come across many reviews, so you will probably not have the time or patience to read them all. I typically try to read the most recent reviews, as these give more accurate and up-to-date information about the accommodation. However, be careful to look at when the reviewer actually stayed at the hotel and not just the date the review was written, as people sometimes wait a few weeks to a few months after returning home to review the accommodation they used. Sometimes reviewers also upload pictures of the room they stayed in so that you can compare these with the pictures used on the hotel website.

Another thing to keep in mind is that everyone has different standards for what an accommodation should offer. Also, some people just like to complain about anything and everything they can think of! We ran across this quite a bit when researching for our European trips. If you have ever been to Europe, then you would know that hotel rooms tend to be a lot smaller by American standards. This is just the way it is there unless you are staying in an American chain hotel (which we typically do not do). If the only reason a reviewer gave a hotel a low ranking was because of the room size, we took that into consideration, as that is just a given in Europe. We have also read complaints about things like what is offered at breakfast. If you are staying in budget hotels, it is always good to keep in mind that, on some level, you do get what you pay for. We typically stay in B&B's or smaller "mom and pop" hotels in Europe. These kind of accommodations are not usually "luxurious" but do offer a lot of other perks, such as friendly hotel staff with lots of great sightseeing advice that you would not normally get at a larger, more luxurious hotel. We would never expect to stay in a small B&B and be pampered like royalty, have a large room, or be able to order room service at all hours of the night, simply because small B&B's are just not that type of accommodation. However, there are people in the world who do have higher and very unrealistic expectations at times. That being said, there are certain things we take very seriously when we read reviews, such as bug problems, safety issues, and interactions with hotel staff, especially if we happen to see several reviews that mention some of these same issues.

Overall, reading reviews can be helpful but you have to learn to read between the lines to find the information you are looking for. We have used this website for just about every trip we have taken since beginning our travels and have mostly been very happy with the places we have chosen.

Feel free to comment with any other tips or websites that you find helpful!