Originally Posted by
jobosapien
I've never been a fan of TripAdvisor for restaurant reviews. IMO it's the lowest of the lows when it comes to crowdsourced content. I only use it as a last resort when traveling internationally since it's still probably in the most cities across the world.
Yelp has increasingly gotten worse quality wise too, and really only has enough content for the US. Internationally it's really sparse.
Today, I increasingly use a combination of:
- Google Maps because I find the quality of content on par with Yelp + I'm already using it to look up directions which makes it easy/convenient + it has content all around the world
- Michelin for major cities (especially the Bib Gourmand list)
- Niche sites like The Infatuation or Eater
- Foursquare occasionally when traveling internationally
Completely agree with the above.
Tripadvisor suffers from herd mentality and self-reinforcing rankings (people who like places that score highly on TA go to places that score highly, rate it highly and on it goes....).
To me, the TA ranking is almost solely based on friendliness of service at an establishment, to the exclusion of the quality of the product. Further, whilst I don’t profess to fully understand their algorithms, in large cities or places with lots of options, the ability of a simple 5 point rating scale to generate an absolute rank order must be questionable. This is exacerbated further when someone goes to restaurant x purely on the basis it’s rated “number 14 of 2,376” versus restaurant y rated number 92, for example.