I only have around 15 reviews because I only review places that sufficiently move my needle enough to bother, and I think a lot of other people are like me.

I understand. I am not saying that all contributors having fewer than ~25 reviews are not offering genuine reviews. But I know that those contributors who have 25 or more reviews are more likely to be genuine and therefore worth my trouble to read their reviews more thoroughly.

Same with me, and anyone reading my reviews would see clearly that they are not fake. I think that some people are putting far too much effort into this - I don't discount a person with only one review if it's well thought out and not just a rant.

And I'm not necessarily going to reply to some random who sends me a message. If I'm therefore judged to be a fake reviewer, well, the loss isn't mine.

I take a slightly different angle. I look at how many POSTS or CONTRIBUTIONS one has on TA. For example, I have thousands of posts on TA, but I do very few reviews. Someone like me who posts a review on TA is probably very reliable/not fake, since I spend a lot of time on TA on the forums.

I prefer to focus my posting time/energy on FT because I feel that the discussions here are --for the most part-- of higher caliber than those on the TA forums.

My take on reviews is completely different though. I use TA reviews to help point me in the direction of food that I might possibly like whenever I end up in cities that are difficult to research elsewhere on the internet. Most of the reviews I've written are geared towards others who are in the same boat.

I set my threshold a lot lower, usually around 3 reviews. Just filtering out the 1-review-ever posts often cuts down clutter significantly. These are most likely to be the shills, the wrote-a-review-because-the-hotel-had-a-kiosk-in-the-lobby types, and the OMG-I-had-a-terrible-experience-because-of-unique-stuff-that-I-won't-let-go crusaders.

I've reviewed some hotels on TripAdvisor. I don't say that a hotel is either good or bad; I describe my experiences, and include everything I believe would matter to someone making a decision.

For instance, I said that budget Hotel X had good Wi-Fi which worked very well. Later, another reviewer was less than happy because the Wi-Fi was down the entire length of his stay. That doesn't make my review inaccurate or misleading. It just means the other guest caught an unlucky break.

A person's satisfaction level may depend on how much he's willing to pay, and what compromises he's willing to make to pay less. Thus someone who's used to budget travel might think Hotel X is great compared to similar places. A non-budget traveler might think it's the pits by any standard. And I also said in my review that a non-budget traveler won't be happy at Hotel X.

That's always a challenge in writing reviews for a hotel: do you score it relative to the entire range of hotels, or relative to what it presents itself as?

This is especially true when rating hotels that only purport to offer basic accommodations. A professional agency like AAA would classify them as 1-diamond properties. Yes, the building may be old, the towels kind of small, and the furniture mismatched. But if the door locks, the room's clean, the wifi works, the staff is polite, and all this comes at a rate that's literally half of what nicer properties two blocks away charge... well, it seems churlish to give them 1 star. They delivered on everything they promised and possibly more.

I still find TripAdvisor useful, the star ratings are good for getting a general idea of which ones to consider but definitely get into the nitty, gritty of the comments before deciding on a property to stay in. I admit I do use the star ratings when looking for restaurants alone. That being said, at the end of the TA hasn't really lead me astray many times at all I don't hesitate to use it in the future.

That's a good question. I think you have to compare a spade to a spade. If you're staying at a Quality Inn, you rate it against other Quality Inns and hotels similar to that. If you're at a full service Starwood property, you hold it to the standard such a property comes with.

The same goes with restaurants, you have to compare the hole in the wall Mexican joints not to Michelin star restaurants, but to other hole in the wall places.

I agree completely (actually, I'm pretty sure I've posted the same in this thread), but I'd also like to add that, when rating restaurants, I take the pool of other restaurants in the city into account.

For example, steaks at the Nanning Marriott cost more than steaks at Morton's in Shanghai even though Morton's is a much better restaurant. But, I would still give the former 5 stars and the latter 3 stars because Nanning doesn't have any other restaurants that I really like, whereas many restaurants in Shanghai are far superior to Morton's. If I didn't use this approach, every restaurant in Nanning would get 1 or 2 stars from me, and that wouldn't be especially useful.

Seems my not-so-great review about a recent visit of the biggest Singaporean amusement park on Sentosa is not going to be published. It was without ranting, rather stating lots of facts, giving plus and minus of the visit, all together a fairy long (but not abusive long) review, ending with 2 points (out of 5)

The park holds a "Tripadvisor #1 attraction" badge, and despite several rather bad reviews (1s and 2s) in the last couple months still get lots of good/great reviews, which makes me believe that they simply filter out MANY bad reviews while letting through some - in the end, they'll still have a good/very good rating, and it won't look like they just let in the good one's, while in fact they're definitely using filters to make the Park looking good (while in reality - from what I've experienced - many guests were all but happy)

I've never had a bad experience using hostels mentioned on WikiTravel. People will quickly edit out any spammy entries.

TripAdvisor seems more hit and miss since such a range of people use it. A business traveller might give a place 2 stars that a backpacker would give 4 stars.

Totally agree. Yet there are posts on ANY review site, FT included, that include and rate based on different perspectives. All rational, reasonable people should be capable of parsing the reviews in FT or TA based upon the criteria that matters to them. On TA, one needs to ignore overall rankings and instead focus on particular criteria that matter more, and parse the reviews accordingly. Here on FT, one has to read through numerous, often unrelated or irrelevant posts in order to get to the reviews that matter most. I don't see much difference.

I rely on both FT and TA for reviews. I also consider other rankings/reviews but I always dig deeper and consider my own preferences in order to qualify them for my own suitability.

I've been hearing from real travelers that Trip Advisor's website contains information that are not accurate or out right wrong. I wonder if TripAdvisor gets paid by business interests to deceive travelers, especially the first timers and inexperienced travelers. My personal experience is that TripAdvisor tends to be more protective of business interests (their advertisers) than the consumers/travelers themselves.