Skift Take
With millions of hotel reviews written by travelers, TripAdvisor has a wealth of information about choosing a place to stay, but you have to know what to look for in the reviews and what to discard.
You just found out you have a business meeting in Santa Fe or your family is planning a vacation to Paris, and you have no clue about picking a suitable hotel in these cities. TripAdvisor hosts more than 75 million reviews and opinions written by travelers, and most of them are geared toward helping you pick -- or avoid -- hotels in your destination city.
They say there is wisdom in numbers and with 60 million unique monthly visitors to its sites around the world, TripAdvisor definitely attracts legions of travelers, but the company has also been widely criticized for the untold numbers of fake reviews that creep into its ranks and rankings.
Although TripAdvisor has a team to wean out suspect reviews, and asks reviewers to stipulate that they stayed at the property, travelers don't have to show receipts or otherwise verify that they are writing based on their real experiences at the hotel.
The following is a guide to getting the most out of TripAdvisor hotel reviews as a means to using the site and its mobile apps for picking a place to stay.
» Strength in Numbers
You can consider user reviews most reliable when there are lots of them for a particular hotel. It is much harder for hotels themselves or their competitors to skew the reviews if there are dozens or even hundreds of critiques. For example, the Four Seasons Hotel Las Vegas currently has 1,723 reviews. To be safe, ignore the reviews that are most gushing about a property -- especially if they are in the clear minority -- and those that bash the hotel in an incendiary manner because they may be suspect. Instead, look for those reviews in the middle of the pack because they may pack more credibility.
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