Eats, Writes, and Leaves

An article about possible manipulations of TripAdvisor, CruiseCritic, and other major user review travel web sites:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/03/29/TRQ016K9M3.DTL&type=travel

I’ve had very good results using TripAdvisor to guide me in the selection of lodgings, and I’ve heard good things about CruiseCritic.

But here’s the deal: as ALWAYS when shopping on the Internet, put your antenna up and use your common sense. Any web site that lets *you* create uncensored reviews is also open to “reviews” by the PR departments of hotels, cruise lines, restaurants, etc. ALWAYS be on alert for fakery. Read critically–if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is, even on a usually reliable web site.

So how do you track down the real story?

1. Cross-check. Look at more than one user-review site. Check TripAdvisor, Yelp, and various others of your choice. If the overall reviews don’t match up, get suspicious.

2. Go to the pros. Look for newspaper (on the web) reviews and articles about the restaurant, attraction, cruise, whatever. (Note that newspaper reviews will be more reliable than magazine articles, which tend to be unrelentingly positive and sometimes advertising-driven.) Newspaper reviewers stake their reputations on their impartiality–find one you like and follow her!

3. Find other sources. For hotels, get a AAA Guide to the state you’re looking at if you want an easy-to-use rating system. Or get a Moon Guide. Yes, I’m gratuitously publicizing my series. But I know that in my book, I was *not* unrelentingly positive. The editors at Avalon Travel let us writers be honest when we don’t like something–in fact they encourage us to do so.