I've been posting reviews on Tripadvisor.com since 2003, and have been reading reviews there even longer. I still find reviews at Tripadvisor to be more useful than on any other site I've used. BUT the reliability of the site's reviews has plummeted in the past couple of years or so.

It used to be that user-generated ranking of hotels in a given area matched reasonably well with how I would rank the hotels. The 5-star places I'd stayed at and had excellent experiences with would occupy the top of the Tripadvisor ranks. Nowadays, for some locations there's a good chance you will find some dinky 2- or 3-star place with adequate but not exceptional customer service rated as the number one hotel rather than a 4- or 5-star hotel that has good or excellent service in the same area.

Part of the problem seems to be that hotel owners and managers now know about Tripadvisor and try to game the system by writing favorable reviews. It used to be easy to identify those reviews because many tripadvisor review writers had written previous reviews for other places while the insiders tended to just have one or a handful of reviews. However, now the vast majority of Tripadvisor reviews seem to be contributed by single-review reviewers. I think this is due at least partly to Tripadvisor having decided to merge reviews from other sites into the Tripadvisor reviews collection.

As a result, I find myself more and more often using Tripadvisor primarily for the photos posted by reviewers rather than for the written reviews.

Still, once I've narrowed down the hotel choices to just one to three places, I will read all of the reviews in the past year or so, depending on the number of reviews per hotel, to get a general idea of what kind of experience the hotel's customers have been reporting, discounting but not completely ignoring any reviews submitted by reviewers who have posted fewer than a half-dozen or so reviews to the site.