But how are you going to distinguish authentic from fake reviews. I left very good reviews for some restaurants and hotels and they truly deserved such a review. Others may think it's fake.

Tripadvisor works for me only by reading reviews in bulk. If I don't target a specific hotel/restaurant, I sort out the restaurants that have very little (generally <50 in smaller cities and less than 100-500 reviews (depending on the size of the city) in downtown areas of big cities), but very positive reviews.

After that I read

• a few very good comments (overtime you can tell when someone is exaggerating and making stuff up)
• a few very bad comments (again. Overtime you can see when a person is just trying to find things to make a restaurant hotel look bad; cf. the "My Rolls didn't have curtains" of the FT review of the Peninsula Hong Kong)
• a few from the middle (they usually seem to give the most decent reviews)

So far my method has not failed me. On some occasion I did get a bad vibe from some places (even before stepping in) and did a last minute change.