FlyerTalk Evangelist
Join Date: Dec 2003
Location: Benicia, California, USA
Programs: AA PLT,AS,UA PP,J6,FB,EY,LH,SQ,HH Dmd,Hyatt Glbl,Marriott Plat,IHG Plat,Accor Gold
Posts: 10,828
On balance I find Tripadvisor quite useful. And, as with FT, some reviews can be fun to read.
A few additional observations:
1. It's of course important to bear in mind the price and thus the nature of the group reviewing a place. For instance, uniformly excellent reviews of a $40/night place in some developing countries might mean that it's well-run, but nevertheless not nearly as nice as a place charging $100/night up the beach. Conversely, a luxury property naturally has more critical guests. As others have noted, sometimes the devil is in the details of what specific reviews say.
2. Sometimes the rankings don't make sense--or at least don't make sense to folks (like most of us) unfamiliar with how TA awards rankings. For some locales, I've seen a place get mostly great reviews but be ranked relatively low.
3. Be wary of a property that has an inordinate number of first-time reviewers, particularly if the language is similar in many of them. Yet additional evidence that something is off can be if you find that such reviewers joined TA about the time of posting the reviews. Now, this could simply be due to their being happy customers encouraged to do so by the hotel. But particularly if the language is similar and the reviews brief, it could be the hotel posting its own misleading information.
4. I've had a few instances where I needed to prompt TA to post my reviews a week after I submitted them. Oddly, a couple of these were about major Hilton properties. Not sure what to make of this.