13 ms·

How TripAdvisor Changed Travel

113 points by jjar 8y ago

dpeck 8y ago
Highlights the larger problem that reviews have become untrustworthy and overwhelming for all but the most gullible and most discerning. The middle is stuck in roughly the same place they’d be without any reviews at all.
ddelt 8y ago
I found this article to be very well written and brought up new facets of this problem that I hadn't previously considered. It was a great read.
- kzzzznot 8y ago
  The Guardian has fairly decent journalists working for them. I don't always agree with their politics, and the writing isn't as good as it was, say, 10 years ago but pieces like this show it is still of a high quality.
Panoramix 8y ago
I do a lot of traveling. My experience improved dramatically when I stopped using TripAdvisor and similar apps. I just go with the flow. Talk to real people. Like a bunch of American tourists (insert any country here) would know what, say, authentic Thai food is supposed to taste like. It all comes down to a bunch of -at best- uninformed people ranking stuff, at worst fake reviewers, bots and scammers. Why would I want that? The worst part is that now if I don't want to look at their stupid logo, it's not enough to uninstall the app. They are everywhere. Restaurants and hotels begging for you to rank them positively, lest you enrage the child gods and send their business into ruin. Beautifully serene temples disgraced by a 15 foot high real life Tripadvisor logo to commemorate that they made it into the top 10 that year. A temple going back more than one thousand years, with trees and rock and the shitty green and black TripAdvisor logo ruining everything. It made me very sad.
- 4ad 8y ago
  I agree that Tripadvisor is useless for restaurants, but how do you find/book hotels? In general hotels are more expensive when booked directly and not through an aggregator, however, how do you even find them without sites like Tripadvisor?
  - dageshi 8y ago
    The main booking websites themselves, e.g. agoda.com or booking.com, their reviews at least are from people who definitely paid to stay...
    - 4ad 8y ago
      Booking.com, Yelp and Tripadvisor are pretty much the same thing to me, and the same low quality. I use them all, but I was curios how would someone do without them.
  - hakanito 8y ago
    You can also look to the niche travel blogs and websites. I usually browse Suitcase Magazine’s travel guides for where to eat/stay/see if I’m in a city they have covered. Have not been disappointed so far
    - 4ad 8y ago
      I do read niche travel blogs and websites, but they very rarely cover lodging, unless it's some exotic destination with special lodging requirements.
  - r00fus 8y ago
    Uhh.. Google Maps? Kayak/Travelocity/Expedia/Orbitz/etc/etc? If I'm staying near a business client or family I ask them. If they don't know I search. Then I see what's available on the booking sites. Tripadvisor only ever came into the picture if I was visiting a resort area where I didn't know anyone.
    - 8y ago
chadash 8y ago
I'm fed up with TripAdvisor, Yelp and similar review sites. Too many of the negative reviews are off topic and they bring down the overall ratings (similar issue for positive reviews as well... people tend to rate things they love or hate, but not things in the middle). For example, Amazon is loaded with one-star reviews from people complaining that they received counterfeit items. This has nothing to do with the product itself and everything to do with a supply chain issue at Amazon (and more so its 3rd party merchants). Similarly, on TripAdvisor and Yelp, I regularly see one star reviews from people who have a specific issue and don't review hotels/restaurants on their own terms. For example, if you are a health nut, you really aught to not post a review of a BBQ joint to complain about lack of healthy options. Family taking a vacation? Don't post reviews of a hotel in the financial district that caters to business travelers because you are upset that they lack good facilities for kids. I highly prefer professional reviewers who have a breadth of experience and also know to review movies on their own terms. That's why I find the aggregated professional movie reviews on Rotten Tomatoes more helpful than the crowd-sourced reviews on IMDB. I think there's a solution that would help the problem a bit though. Have two tiers of reviewers. For example, on TripAdvisor, the first tier would include everyone, similar to what you have right now. Second tier would be an aggregated number by "gold" reviewers. To qualify, a gold reviewer would need to have: - More than N number of reviews - An individual review would only count if it was more than a minimum number of words - Let users mark reviews as helpful or not helpful. A gold user will need to be above a threshold for percentage of helpful vs not helpful reviews, with a minimum number of helpful reviews. Amazon already marks some reviewers as being, for example, a "top 1000 reviewer". What I'd like to see is for those top tier reviewers' reviews to be broken out as a separate score.
- mtgx 8y ago
  Wouldn't that lead to vendors starting to buy off the "gold reviewers"?
- agumonkey 8y ago
  is there a term to express our this era technology is just allowing useless noise to pass as signal ? when myspace et al started to pop, web 2.0, dynamic webpage interactions was the fastest way to heaven, now it seems we read the map upside down. ps: maybe we're rediscovering how mobs are bad
CodeSheikh 8y ago
Any good alternatives to TripAdvisor? What about: - Conde Nast [www.condenast.com] - TripSavvy [www.tripsavvy.com]
- adrr 8y ago
  I use wikitravel and buy books from publishers like lonely planet. If I rent a car, i always try to find some smart-phone app that can do narration based on location. A lot of these apps are done by a local person/company and provide information on what their favorite places are.
ryanackley 8y ago
Really strange to see the negative comments. My favorite thing about TripAdvisor is that I feel empowered when I have a terrible experience at a venue. I can just go leave them a crappy review. It's very cathartic. Also, I find most of the reviews to be generally accurate. It sounds like other people disagree with that which is strange. I've never used TripAdvisor to find a restaurant or a hotel and then felt like the reviews were faked.
- kbar13 8y ago
  i think your story is a great example of why open review aggregation sites are a broken model. these reviews are not comprehensive. a lot of people only go there to post about a shitty experience or out-of-this-world experience. it's also broken in situations where reviewers are not familiar with the culture or standards of the place they're visiting, i.e. critiquing the service/cleanliness/decor of an authentic hole-in-the-wall chinese restaurant.
  - lotsofpulp 8y ago
    Why would you not want to be aware of bad service or cleanliness in a restaurant?
    - kbar13 8y ago
      because there's a different standard you should hold a street hawker to vs a high end restaurant. to be clear, you should be paying attention to the tastiness of the food (usually comfort food) and the atmosphere of something like a street stand in asia, where you might comment on attention to detail and innovation at someplace like coi.
      - lotsofpulp 8y ago
        In my opinion, clean and not bad service is a standard every restaurant should be able to meet.
- altec3 8y ago
rglover 8y ago
Just...go places.
cageface 8y ago
I've seen a lot of cases here in SE Asia of restaurants and hotels posting fake bad reviews of their competitors' businesses. It's commonplace enough now that I generally disregard TripAdvisor ratings.
Canada 8y ago
I look at TripAdvisor, Yelp, and other regional restaurant review sites. Tablelog is the only one with overall ratings that seem to reflect reality, but that's Japan only. Even though the big two are more noise than signal as far as reviews go, at least I can see pictures. Often I use these sites while sitting in the place to decide what to order. I'm starting to use Google Maps more because TripAdvisor and Yelp sites suck so bad and I refuse to install their low quality, spammy apps. What I wish existed: - NO reviews. I want facts not opinions. - Food photos only. No useless photos of people, random interiors, drinks, etc. Delete those and ban the idiots who upload them. - Ruthlessly curate the photos. I want a couple of photos of each dish, only the best quality ones that are recent. - Caption the photos and tag the food. I want the exact string on the menu neatly displayed on each photo. I want to be able to search "pizza" and get a stream of photos of the food. - A clean set of photos of the menu so I can see the prices. OCR that into searchable text. - Let me privately rate the food. I guess what I'm describing is kind of Tinder for food. And no ads of course. Not gonna happen.. but hey I can dream.
- 4ad 8y ago
  > Food photos only. No useless photos of people, random interiors, drinks, etc. I agree that photos of people are ridiculous, but I want photos of the interior. The ambiance of a place is even more important than the quality of the food (to me), and it's one of the attributes hardest to portray in reviews (mostly because people who review are not professional reviewers). Good photos help here.
  - Canada 8y ago
    Fair enough. What makes a good interior shot is more subjective. The idea with the food pics is that it's very easy to tell which photo of the same thing is better. I think the big sites must know this and they could do it, but users who contribute might get discouraged if they throw out so many uploads.
trophycase 8y ago
If you're the kind of person who likes unstructured travel instead of a checklist to get all those instagram pics, TripAdvisor really isn't the place you should be going. I recently used Yelp/TA in Jamaica and it put us at Rick's Cafe, one of the most highly rated and visited places in all of Jamaica. They had a gift shop and their $25 "jerk chicken" was literally baked chicken breast covered in barbecue sauce. Absolutely embarrassing and I felt shame for even giving them my money. I could have gone across the street to any jerk center and got something an order of magnitude better for 5 bucks.
- ekovarski 8y ago
  this is why I agree with panoramix comment; ditch yelp and travel advisor and talk to the locals. It's like using Waze during rush hour, it steers everyone to the same route and in this case tourists trap. Not that the locals are always right either, as tastes differ, but it sets you off in the right direction. ... and yeah Rick's Cafe is overrated. You want to find the places before they become the "it" place to be put on the 'gram.
cesidio 8y ago
I hope that many reviews help having a better idea of the place before going, but I don't trust them too much, for they can be not authentic, or driven by personal feelings. I rely more on qualified reviews like lonely planet guides, 8 out of 10 times they work well for me, and the remaining times are just average, nothing too bad.
whitepoplar 8y ago
Tips that have improved my travel experience: 1) Don't go to a "destination" city. Don't go to a city that derives too much of its income from tourism. 2) Trip length: not too long, not too short. 3) Make a loose itinerary, but rip it up occasionally. 4) Bring a phone, but no laptop. Don't use TripAdvisor/Yelp/etc. Ask around. Walk around. Have strange conversations. Don't be afraid to stay in non-traditional lodging. 5) Invest in a place before you go: learn some of the language, read a great book from the place, etc. This will make it much more interesting and memorable. 6) Don't go on trips just because your friends posted about their "amazing" vacations and you feel like you have to go, too. Travel sucks if the excitement doesn't come from within. 7) If you're on a limited budget, don't go to expensive cities and scrimp. It's no fun. Go to cheaper cities and splurge. Or have a blast and go camping with your friends a short drive away. 8) Get fit and dress nicely. Whether you like it or not, this is how people judge you. It's easier to be a good-looking guy/gal in a new place. Happy travels! :-)
- dpeck 8y ago
  | 1) Don't go to a "destination" city. Don't go to a city that derives too much of its income from tourism. This is good advice. Generally the "second cities" of a country gives a better experience. More open borders and intermixing has been wonderful, but it does mean that a lot of capital/primary cities feel very similar.
- ekovarski 8y ago
  Great list; I would only add which kinda goes with (3), don't set your expectations too high - go with an open and exploratory mind, you might even discover new unexpected experiences. At times we plan a trip based on what we've read or seen and have this picturesque and dreamlike state concocted in our mind and then when reality doesn't meet expectations we spiral down ward and see everything else negatively. Go with an open mind, don't let minor things upset you, and try to make the best of everything.
splonk 8y ago
Simple rule for using TripAdvisor in any even vaguely touristy place: Ignore the top ~20 or so restaurants/hotels when sorted by rating. You can pretty much guarantee that at a minimum, they're soliciting reviews from a pool of satisfied customers, and a good chunk of them are just flat out buying reviews. This rule doesn't work as well for attractions, since the big ones tend to make their way to the top regardless, but the attraction list is pretty useful on its own if you dig down a ways. I've found lots of interesting small places that I'd have never otherwise found down in the sub-50th percentile rated attractions. I do generally like the trick mentioned below of only looking at bad reviews, but I'm fairly relaxed about certain things. Bad neighborhood, overpriced food, poor valet service? Meh, don't care. Room smells of smoke? Not staying there. Most of my hotel research is based on filtering out unacceptable things, rather than optimizing the positive aspects. For hotels, I have vaguely more trust in booking.com reviews, since in theory you have to stay at a hotel to leave a review there. (I do mention every time in these threads that the booking.com review scale is wack, and the median score was actually something like 8.1/10 when I scraped a lot of them, so take those 7.0 "Good" ratings with a grain of salt). In theory in the US Opentable ratings would work the same way for restaurants, but that's restricting the pool of restaurants to those that take reservations, and I don't use those ratings myself, so I'm not totally sure how accurate it is. Still probably beats Yelp, and definitely beats TripAdvisor.
rfvisuals 8y ago
Based on previous posts I feel comfortable sharing a project with the HN community in this thread. It's a web app with for anyone to post travel related tips/thoughts. I'm open to honest feedback. www.worldpeer.com Thanks!
CaptainZapp 8y ago
This : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shed_at_Dulwich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shed_at_Dulwich says everything you really need to know about TripAdvisor and their ilk.
Nursie 8y ago
The main problem I have with tripadvisor ratings is that they don't actually give you a quality guide. A 5 star tripadvisor rating doesn't mean the 2 star hotel under review is actually a 5 star property, merely that most people enjoyed themselves and got what they expected. Which also means that allegedly 4 and 5 star properties that are crap can get great reviews if their customers are ignorant but leave happy... And that's before you get into the area of honesty, competing motives etc etc
eaenki 8y ago
I travel quite often. My 2 cents are: look at the 1 star reviews. If the one star reviews are less than 1:500 and the pictures are that of a well designed restaurant, it should be good with a 99% chance. Obviously, that’s kinda hard to find - but that should be the threshold. Regarding hotels/apartments: On Booking it should be 9.1+ And it should have an amazingly curated breakfast (check the pics too). On Airbnb it should be either a “plus” or a “super host” with 5 star reviews only. Read the reviews tho. They often mention noises or lack of hot water. Those might be considered red flags. And as a general rule of thumb, when you think you’re getting a great deal because it’s cheap, you’re not. Trust me, you’re not. Following the above advice, I never ever had a bad experience - but it definitely costed above average.

113 points by jjar 8y ago

Highlights the larger problem that reviews have become untrustworthy and overwhelming for all but the most gullible and most discerning. The middle is stuck in roughly the same place they’d be without any reviews at all.

ddelt 8y ago

I found this article to be very well written and brought up new facets of this problem that I hadn't previously considered. It was a great read.

kzzzznot 8y ago
The Guardian has fairly decent journalists working for them. I don't always agree with their politics, and the writing isn't as good as it was, say, 10 years ago but pieces like this show it is still of a high quality.

Panoramix 8y ago

I do a lot of traveling. My experience improved dramatically when I stopped using TripAdvisor and similar apps. I just go with the flow. Talk to real people. Like a bunch of American tourists (insert any country here) would know what, say, authentic Thai food is supposed to taste like. It all comes down to a bunch of -at best- uninformed people ranking stuff, at worst fake reviewers, bots and scammers. Why would I want that? The worst part is that now if I don't want to look at their stupid logo, it's not enough to uninstall the app. They are everywhere. Restaurants and hotels begging for you to rank them positively, lest you enrage the child gods and send their business into ruin. Beautifully serene temples disgraced by a 15 foot high real life Tripadvisor logo to commemorate that they made it into the top 10 that year. A temple going back more than one thousand years, with trees and rock and the shitty green and black TripAdvisor logo ruining everything. It made me very sad.

4ad 8y ago
I agree that Tripadvisor is useless for restaurants, but how do you find/book hotels? In general hotels are more expensive when booked directly and not through an aggregator, however, how do you even find them without sites like Tripadvisor?
- dageshi 8y ago
  The main booking websites themselves, e.g. agoda.com or booking.com, their reviews at least are from people who definitely paid to stay...
  - 4ad 8y ago
    Booking.com, Yelp and Tripadvisor are pretty much the same thing to me, and the same low quality. I use them all, but I was curios how would someone do without them.
- hakanito 8y ago
  You can also look to the niche travel blogs and websites. I usually browse Suitcase Magazine’s travel guides for where to eat/stay/see if I’m in a city they have covered. Have not been disappointed so far
  - 4ad 8y ago
    I do read niche travel blogs and websites, but they very rarely cover lodging, unless it's some exotic destination with special lodging requirements.
- r00fus 8y ago
  Uhh.. Google Maps? Kayak/Travelocity/Expedia/Orbitz/etc/etc? If I'm staying near a business client or family I ask them. If they don't know I search. Then I see what's available on the booking sites. Tripadvisor only ever came into the picture if I was visiting a resort area where I didn't know anyone.
  - 8y ago

chadash 8y ago

I'm fed up with TripAdvisor, Yelp and similar review sites. Too many of the negative reviews are off topic and they bring down the overall ratings (similar issue for positive reviews as well... people tend to rate things they love or hate, but not things in the middle). For example, Amazon is loaded with one-star reviews from people complaining that they received counterfeit items. This has nothing to do with the product itself and everything to do with a supply chain issue at Amazon (and more so its 3rd party merchants). Similarly, on TripAdvisor and Yelp, I regularly see one star reviews from people who have a specific issue and don't review hotels/restaurants on their own terms. For example, if you are a health nut, you really aught to not post a review of a BBQ joint to complain about lack of healthy options. Family taking a vacation? Don't post reviews of a hotel in the financial district that caters to business travelers because you are upset that they lack good facilities for kids. I highly prefer professional reviewers who have a breadth of experience and also know to review movies on their own terms. That's why I find the aggregated professional movie reviews on Rotten Tomatoes more helpful than the crowd-sourced reviews on IMDB. I think there's a solution that would help the problem a bit though. Have two tiers of reviewers. For example, on TripAdvisor, the first tier would include everyone, similar to what you have right now. Second tier would be an aggregated number by "gold" reviewers. To qualify, a gold reviewer would need to have: - More than N number of reviews - An individual review would only count if it was more than a minimum number of words - Let users mark reviews as helpful or not helpful. A gold user will need to be above a threshold for percentage of helpful vs not helpful reviews, with a minimum number of helpful reviews. Amazon already marks some reviewers as being, for example, a "top 1000 reviewer". What I'd like to see is for those top tier reviewers' reviews to be broken out as a separate score.

mtgx 8y ago
Wouldn't that lead to vendors starting to buy off the "gold reviewers"?
agumonkey 8y ago
is there a term to express our this era technology is just allowing useless noise to pass as signal ? when myspace et al started to pop, web 2.0, dynamic webpage interactions was the fastest way to heaven, now it seems we read the map upside down. ps: maybe we're rediscovering how mobs are bad

CodeSheikh 8y ago

Any good alternatives to TripAdvisor? What about: - Conde Nast [www.condenast.com] - TripSavvy [www.tripsavvy.com]

adrr 8y ago
I use wikitravel and buy books from publishers like lonely planet. If I rent a car, i always try to find some smart-phone app that can do narration based on location. A lot of these apps are done by a local person/company and provide information on what their favorite places are.

ryanackley 8y ago

Really strange to see the negative comments. My favorite thing about TripAdvisor is that I feel empowered when I have a terrible experience at a venue. I can just go leave them a crappy review. It's very cathartic. Also, I find most of the reviews to be generally accurate. It sounds like other people disagree with that which is strange. I've never used TripAdvisor to find a restaurant or a hotel and then felt like the reviews were faked.

kbar13 8y ago
i think your story is a great example of why open review aggregation sites are a broken model. these reviews are not comprehensive. a lot of people only go there to post about a shitty experience or out-of-this-world experience. it's also broken in situations where reviewers are not familiar with the culture or standards of the place they're visiting, i.e. critiquing the service/cleanliness/decor of an authentic hole-in-the-wall chinese restaurant.
- lotsofpulp 8y ago
  Why would you not want to be aware of bad service or cleanliness in a restaurant?
  - kbar13 8y ago
    because there's a different standard you should hold a street hawker to vs a high end restaurant. to be clear, you should be paying attention to the tastiness of the food (usually comfort food) and the atmosphere of something like a street stand in asia, where you might comment on attention to detail and innovation at someplace like coi.
    - lotsofpulp 8y ago
      In my opinion, clean and not bad service is a standard every restaurant should be able to meet.
altec3 8y ago

rglover 8y ago

Just...go places.

cageface 8y ago

I've seen a lot of cases here in SE Asia of restaurants and hotels posting fake bad reviews of their competitors' businesses. It's commonplace enough now that I generally disregard TripAdvisor ratings.

Canada 8y ago

I look at TripAdvisor, Yelp, and other regional restaurant review sites. Tablelog is the only one with overall ratings that seem to reflect reality, but that's Japan only. Even though the big two are more noise than signal as far as reviews go, at least I can see pictures. Often I use these sites while sitting in the place to decide what to order. I'm starting to use Google Maps more because TripAdvisor and Yelp sites suck so bad and I refuse to install their low quality, spammy apps. What I wish existed: - NO reviews. I want facts not opinions. - Food photos only. No useless photos of people, random interiors, drinks, etc. Delete those and ban the idiots who upload them. - Ruthlessly curate the photos. I want a couple of photos of each dish, only the best quality ones that are recent. - Caption the photos and tag the food. I want the exact string on the menu neatly displayed on each photo. I want to be able to search "pizza" and get a stream of photos of the food. - A clean set of photos of the menu so I can see the prices. OCR that into searchable text. - Let me privately rate the food. I guess what I'm describing is kind of Tinder for food. And no ads of course. Not gonna happen.. but hey I can dream.

4ad 8y ago
> Food photos only. No useless photos of people, random interiors, drinks, etc. I agree that photos of people are ridiculous, but I want photos of the interior. The ambiance of a place is even more important than the quality of the food (to me), and it's one of the attributes hardest to portray in reviews (mostly because people who review are not professional reviewers). Good photos help here.
- Canada 8y ago
  Fair enough. What makes a good interior shot is more subjective. The idea with the food pics is that it's very easy to tell which photo of the same thing is better. I think the big sites must know this and they could do it, but users who contribute might get discouraged if they throw out so many uploads.

trophycase 8y ago

If you're the kind of person who likes unstructured travel instead of a checklist to get all those instagram pics, TripAdvisor really isn't the place you should be going. I recently used Yelp/TA in Jamaica and it put us at Rick's Cafe, one of the most highly rated and visited places in all of Jamaica. They had a gift shop and their $25 "jerk chicken" was literally baked chicken breast covered in barbecue sauce. Absolutely embarrassing and I felt shame for even giving them my money. I could have gone across the street to any jerk center and got something an order of magnitude better for 5 bucks.

ekovarski 8y ago
this is why I agree with panoramix comment; ditch yelp and travel advisor and talk to the locals. It's like using Waze during rush hour, it steers everyone to the same route and in this case tourists trap. Not that the locals are always right either, as tastes differ, but it sets you off in the right direction. ... and yeah Rick's Cafe is overrated. You want to find the places before they become the "it" place to be put on the 'gram.

cesidio 8y ago

I hope that many reviews help having a better idea of the place before going, but I don't trust them too much, for they can be not authentic, or driven by personal feelings. I rely more on qualified reviews like lonely planet guides, 8 out of 10 times they work well for me, and the remaining times are just average, nothing too bad.

whitepoplar 8y ago

Tips that have improved my travel experience: 1) Don't go to a "destination" city. Don't go to a city that derives too much of its income from tourism. 2) Trip length: not too long, not too short. 3) Make a loose itinerary, but rip it up occasionally. 4) Bring a phone, but no laptop. Don't use TripAdvisor/Yelp/etc. Ask around. Walk around. Have strange conversations. Don't be afraid to stay in non-traditional lodging. 5) Invest in a place before you go: learn some of the language, read a great book from the place, etc. This will make it much more interesting and memorable. 6) Don't go on trips just because your friends posted about their "amazing" vacations and you feel like you have to go, too. Travel sucks if the excitement doesn't come from within. 7) If you're on a limited budget, don't go to expensive cities and scrimp. It's no fun. Go to cheaper cities and splurge. Or have a blast and go camping with your friends a short drive away. 8) Get fit and dress nicely. Whether you like it or not, this is how people judge you. It's easier to be a good-looking guy/gal in a new place. Happy travels! :-)

dpeck 8y ago
| 1) Don't go to a "destination" city. Don't go to a city that derives too much of its income from tourism. This is good advice. Generally the "second cities" of a country gives a better experience. More open borders and intermixing has been wonderful, but it does mean that a lot of capital/primary cities feel very similar.
ekovarski 8y ago
Great list; I would only add which kinda goes with (3), don't set your expectations too high - go with an open and exploratory mind, you might even discover new unexpected experiences. At times we plan a trip based on what we've read or seen and have this picturesque and dreamlike state concocted in our mind and then when reality doesn't meet expectations we spiral down ward and see everything else negatively. Go with an open mind, don't let minor things upset you, and try to make the best of everything.

splonk 8y ago

Simple rule for using TripAdvisor in any even vaguely touristy place: Ignore the top ~20 or so restaurants/hotels when sorted by rating. You can pretty much guarantee that at a minimum, they're soliciting reviews from a pool of satisfied customers, and a good chunk of them are just flat out buying reviews. This rule doesn't work as well for attractions, since the big ones tend to make their way to the top regardless, but the attraction list is pretty useful on its own if you dig down a ways. I've found lots of interesting small places that I'd have never otherwise found down in the sub-50th percentile rated attractions. I do generally like the trick mentioned below of only looking at bad reviews, but I'm fairly relaxed about certain things. Bad neighborhood, overpriced food, poor valet service? Meh, don't care. Room smells of smoke? Not staying there. Most of my hotel research is based on filtering out unacceptable things, rather than optimizing the positive aspects. For hotels, I have vaguely more trust in booking.com reviews, since in theory you have to stay at a hotel to leave a review there. (I do mention every time in these threads that the booking.com review scale is wack, and the median score was actually something like 8.1/10 when I scraped a lot of them, so take those 7.0 "Good" ratings with a grain of salt). In theory in the US Opentable ratings would work the same way for restaurants, but that's restricting the pool of restaurants to those that take reservations, and I don't use those ratings myself, so I'm not totally sure how accurate it is. Still probably beats Yelp, and definitely beats TripAdvisor.

rfvisuals 8y ago

Based on previous posts I feel comfortable sharing a project with the HN community in this thread. It's a web app with for anyone to post travel related tips/thoughts. I'm open to honest feedback. www.worldpeer.com Thanks!

CaptainZapp 8y ago

This : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shed_at_Dulwich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shed_at_Dulwich says everything you really need to know about TripAdvisor and their ilk.

Nursie 8y ago

The main problem I have with tripadvisor ratings is that they don't actually give you a quality guide. A 5 star tripadvisor rating doesn't mean the 2 star hotel under review is actually a 5 star property, merely that most people enjoyed themselves and got what they expected. Which also means that allegedly 4 and 5 star properties that are crap can get great reviews if their customers are ignorant but leave happy... And that's before you get into the area of honesty, competing motives etc etc

eaenki 8y ago

I travel quite often. My 2 cents are: look at the 1 star reviews. If the one star reviews are less than 1:500 and the pictures are that of a well designed restaurant, it should be good with a 99% chance. Obviously, that’s kinda hard to find - but that should be the threshold. Regarding hotels/apartments: On Booking it should be 9.1+ And it should have an amazingly curated breakfast (check the pics too). On Airbnb it should be either a “plus” or a “super host” with 5 star reviews only. Read the reviews tho. They often mention noises or lack of hot water. Those might be considered red flags. And as a general rule of thumb, when you think you’re getting a great deal because it’s cheap, you’re not. Trust me, you’re not. Following the above advice, I never ever had a bad experience - but it definitely costed above average.