The other day I was discussing good and bad hotels with two of my very well-traveled students of English. “Tell me about your worst experience,” I challenged them.
“That’s easy, replied Enrique and Rosy. “Years ago we wanted to go to Cusco, Peru, so we looked for five-star hotels on the internet and found one that looked magnificent, with a huge plasma TV in every room. It seemed perfect, so we booked it.”
Upon their arrival in Cusco, the hotel’s car failed to pick them up at the airport as promised, so they took a taxi into town, which brought them to a beat-up old house. “There was some lawyer’s sign hanging above the door,” said Enrique, “but nothing announcing it was a hotel ... we told the driver there must be a mistake, but he insisted this was the right place.”
Inside, they found a “manager” but no lobby or desk. Their room proved to be dirty and shabby, with a sagging bed. “And, by the way, the TV was a small, ancient, black-and-white model.”
Next, they asked, “Where’s the restaurant?”
“Right here,” said the manager, pointing to a decrepit old table with two chairs.
“You tricked us,” Enrique told the manager. “We want our money back.”
“You can only cancel via internet,” replied the manager.
Fuming, Enrique insisted the manager lend him his Palmtop PC, which he did. A few minutes later, Enrique and Rosy found themselves pulling their suitcases down the street in the cold rain, with no place to go ... in the middle of Semana Santa.
This story ends well, because my students were lucky enough to stumble upon a hotel that had a cancellation for that night. “This hotel was simple, but perfectly clean,” said Rosy, “and it cost one third the price of the awful place we had booked.”
Several similar experiences of my own encouraged me to start contributing my reviews of hotels, restaurants and tourist attractions to Tripadvisor.com, which, by the way, pays nothing to its reviewers and refuses contributions from anyone who has received an incentive to write.
The reason I joined the ranks of the tripadvisors was the enormous benefits I’ve reaped from volunteer reviewers at sites like Amazon and Internet Movie Data Base. I figured it was time for me to pay forward.
Tripadvisor is a curious organization. According to the New York Times, the company’s president, Stephen Kaufer was planning to take a vacation in Mexico in 1985 and searched the internet for unbiased opinions about a particular hotel. “What I got,” he says, “was a thousand sites showcasing exactly the same gorgeous picture and the very same descriptive paragraphs.” Eventually he came upon a write-up by people who had actually stayed at the hotel and found it was not at all what he wanted. “I had dodged a bullet,” he adds.
In 2000, Kaufer and several others founded Tripadvisor. He told the BBC, “We started as a site where we were focused more on those official words from guidebooks or newspapers or magazines. We also had a button in the very beginning that said, ‘Visitors add your own review,’ and boy, did that just take off. Pretty soon the number of average consumer reviews far surpassed the number of ‘professional reviews’. That is when the site really turned into this collection of what the normal traveler was saying wherever they were going.”
Can you trust the reviews on Tripadvisor? I think you’ll find the site highly beneficial as long as you apply a few rules of common sense, which apply to any website with customer reviews:
1. Look at the negative reviews, which often give more concrete information than the positive. If lots of people are complaining about basic requirements like hot water or clean sheets, consider yourself warned.
2. Weed out the cranks. There are always a few people who go berserk over trivialities or are upset over something that could only happen once in a lifetime. On Tripadvisor, you can click on a suspicious reviewer’s name and see whether or not his or her other reviews look balanced.
3. Check out the hotel’s response to criticism. Many managers of responsible establishments reply to negative reviews – sometimes to all reviews. Their tone and willingness to correct mistakes can often give you an insight into the quality of the staff you’ll be dealing with.
Tripadvisor has had its ups and downs over the years with spates of phony reviews, but they have always recuperated. In 2013 they began a policy that allows hoteliers to “wipe the slate clean” when they renovate or update. Their steadfastness in improving their site seems to have paid off, as they now appear to be the world’s largest travel site with 350 million unique visitors per month and 385 million reviews.
Note that Tripadvisor publishes reviews of very small establishments in remote corners of Mexico. If you read my article on Parangueo Crater in Guanajuato and want to spend the night in the nearby pueblo of Valle de Santiago, Tripadvisor will lead you to the Casa Grande Hotel which I found to be the “bueno, bonito y barato” we all dream of. After your trip, you too can write a review, which takes only a minute or two. If all of us make an effort to do this, we may never have another Hotel Horror Story to tell our grandchildren.