A good practice for working with TripAdvisor

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A good practice for working with TripAdvisor

Finding the right hotel is one of the most important tasks of your trip planning.
Hotel is usually one of the most expensive expenses of your travel and has great impact on the overall experience of your travel.

There is no doubt that TripAdvisor is a great service full with useful information that provides real value when you want to take a decision and book your hotel.

Here's a few simple practices how to better analyze TripAdvisor's users reviews. 
These practices will enable you to avoid possible disappointments, like the one I recently had...



On September my wife and I flew the beautiful Island of Koh-Samoi, Thailand, to celebrate my wife’s birthday; we had only 7 days so we decided to split them into 4 days at a luxurious isolated resort recommended by friends and the remaining 3 days on the beach of Lamai at a hotel that was recommended by TripAdvisor users. The first 4 days on the isolated resort were awesome and magical as we expected. Things started to get off track while we were heading to the hotel in Lamai beach: the TAXI driver, which usually knows all the hotels on the Island didn’t know about the hotel and once we finally got to our destination he told us that he knows this hotel BUT it had a different name last time he was there... After spending one night at the hotel we decided to leave it immediately as we didn't like the room, the beach and the atmosphere.
So now, we had to look for another hotel for the 2 remaining days…
It was a bummer and completely different from what the reviews on TripAdvisor suggested.
So what did I learn from this experience?
Crowd sourcing works better with large numbers so when the numbers are small it is a good practice to read carefully the reviews before you take any decision.

The numbers are usually small in 2 major cases:
1.         The hotel is new.
2.         The area on which the hotel is located is not that popular.

 In case the hotel is new, I learned that it is highly recommended to go over the reviews that gave the hotel an “Average”, “Poor” and “Terrible” rank and try to understand if there is any consistency between the reviews or is it just a list of different cases dealing with honest mistakes made by the hotel team. 

In case the hotel is in a less popular area (you can figure this out by looking at the other hotels in this geographical area - they all will probably have a small numbers of reviews), focus on the latest reviews to get the most up-to-date information.

 Bear in mind that hotel owners are well aware of TripAdvisor's power and do whatever they can in order to influence their hotel score. They usually do this by pushing as many positive reviews for their hotel as they can…

 So…if you are considering ordering a hotel with small numbers of reviews, make sure to read closely the reviews. Remember: every voice counts and you don’t want to be surprised! Even if those hotels were praised for the quality of their service, take the extra time to dig into the reviews.

 I skipped that point and it cost me a day of frustration… but never the less, we still managed to get over this and had a great time!
Keep on exploring the world!!!

Here is a short video by TripAdvisor explaining business owners how to improve their popularity ranking, that will give you a better understanding about the TripAdvisor ranking method: 

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