Thirdworld wrote:
Find it interesting how passionate people can be about hotels. After Jazz mentioned Tripadvisor I went there and read some reviews of hotels. Seems like that people are either cheerleaders or are extremely angry. Many of the hotels had opposite reviews right next to each other. One claims it is the biggest shit hole they have ever been in and the next is cheery and the best hotel they've ever seen. For this reason I always like to get various opinions from different sources. TA has so many agendas on it that you really have to know how to read it to make heads or tails of things...
TA can be helpful but you do have to wade through a lot of BS. I've read about hotels contacting the author of a bad review on TA and offering them compensation if they remove the review. For other destinations I've used TA and come across several glowing recommendations mixed in with terrible ones and the great reviews all seemed to use the same writing style and grammatical mistakes, or the good reviews referred to the owner or manager by name and say how wonderful of a person they were.
A few days ago I looked at the latest TA reviews for DI and noticed about 3 reviews on the first page that were all made by first time posters which all gave TA's version of 5-star reviews, and most seemed to mention Guy G. by name and how great he was.