Reading reviews about hotels online can be extremely helpful. It can also be incredibly overwhelming. How can so many people have such different opinions about the exact same hotel??? Here are some tips for sorting through reviews:
-Think about what is most important for you. Is it the location, the food, the pool, or something else? Then search for those phrases in the reviews to see what people say about that specific aspect.
-Don't read through every review word for word- just skim through and look for themes.
-Don't just go by the ranking of the hotel. Smaller hotels will never reach the top even if they have really positive reviews because they won't have as many reviews.
-Do look at some of the other numbers such as the percentage of travelers that would recommend a hotel (I aim for over 80%), and also look at the breakdown of the types of travelers. This will give you an idea of the types of guests that usually stay at the hotel. For example, a hotel with a lot of family reviewers will most likely have a lot of kids.
-Look at the dates when reviews were written. If the last negative review was written a long time ago, you can assume those issues have been resolved.
-If a majority of reviews are positive and there are just a few negative ones, ignore those. Not everyone is going to be happy with every hotel. But if a vast majority of people love it, you probably will as well.
Trip Advisor is still the king, but there are a few other helpful sites I want to share. Oyster reviews give you a great idea of what a hotel is actually like. They clearly list out the pros and cons, and also compare the hotel to others nearby. The pictures are really helpful as well. The drawback- they only have reviews for a limited amount of destinations, and don't have every hotel.
Another helpful site is booking.com. I use this site for hotels in Europe, especially smaller places. The reviews are brief, but you can get a good idea whether people like the place and how the location is.
Do you have any other favorite sites, or tips for sorting through reviews?
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