Essentials
- The cheaper the lodge, the more reviews matter — Disaster rarely lurks in high-end lodges, but when you move down to cheaper hotels, guesthouses, hostels and other types, there are greater odds of irritants and serious problems.
- Find out the bad stuff — You already know the good stuff from the lodge description. Read reviews to find out what’s wrong with the lodge or room or to get tips on room selection. Limit your reading to 2-4 star reviews (bubbles on TripAdvisor). Both 1-star rants and 5-star raves won’t help you find a reasonable explanation of problems.
- First consult Booking — Reviews on Booking.com are searchable by rating level and selected tags (WiFi, breakfast…) and are provided by actual guests whose number of reviews and helpful votes are shown.
- Backup: TripAdvisor — If the lodge is not reviewed on Booking.com or there are too few reviews, TA will likely have some. The main trouble with TA reviews is that they are not necessarily provided by guests. On the other hand, TA review filtering is superior.
- Backup for hostels: Hostelworld — More details on hostels.
- Backup for private rentals: Airbnb — Airbnb has superior reviews, although it doesn’t capture all the private rentals.
- TripAdvisor for SOA and BIASOA travelers — TA is unique among the accommodation sites in listing lodges not listed on any OTA. That means you can find reviews of these hidden gems on TA and nowhere else.
the Big Picture
By now, you’ve selected a lodge or two and want to check that everything that matters to you is okay. You’ve seen the aggregate review score posted on the booking site, but that’s not enough for the seasoned traveler.
Full reviews are an an indispensable step in your decision-making. The booking site will provide a glowing description of the lodge, usually provided by the lodge itself. So reviews should provide the flip side, exposing bad experiences of former guests. These range from the minor irritants that cause so many petty complaints to serious problems that should eliminate the lodge from consideration.
The lower your budget, the more important it is to know the bad stuff. Cheap lodges are cheap for a reason and some of those reasons are nasty problems that are revealed only in reviews. Maybe the lodge is in a derelict district. Or the bar on the ground floor will keep you awake all night. Or the hot water stops at 8. Or the WiFi doesn’t reach the rooms. Or the rooms are damp and dirty. Or they’re shared with scampering wildlife.
But even more expensive lodges have their hidden bruises. You’re paying more for a “better” lodge, so you have expectations that it will offer a better level of service. You might be disappointed to find out on your first night that you can hear all the neighbors through the walls. Or that the “free breakfast” is a spartan continental of white bread and undrinkable coffee. Or that the “ocean view” is a slice of water glimpsed between tower blocks. Reviews are where you find out these gritty truths.
Countless reviews whine about small complaints. Some of them are justified, but there are endless rants about lack of a spare towel, smudges on the bathroom mirror or dust bunnies under the bed. But that’s not what really matters — you want to know about problems that will have a major impact on security or the quality of rest.
Even if there are no disasters lurking, you can use reviews to pick between two similar lodges. In this case you would look for one or two small differences that might be more important to you than to another guest. One might be on a quieter street, but reviewers criticize the negligent housekeeping. Which is more important?
Where to find the good reviews
Hotels, B&Bs, hostels and more
There are only two sources of useful reviews: Booking.com and TripAdvisor. Booking has all four key Quality Features we require for reviews. TripAdvisor has three.
- Full reviews — Many sites now use snippets of selected reviews. Booking and TA post full reviews in chronological order. TA lets reviewers compose whatever they want and some of the longer, more thoughtful reviews are very good indeed. Booking forces a Pros & Cons format on reviewers, leading to shorter, more focused, easier-to-read reviews. Advantage: Booking.
- Written by actual guests — After check-out, Booking invites guests to contribute reviews within a limited time, so all of them are submitted by actual guests not too long after their experience. TripAdvisor accepts reviews from anyone (guest or not) at any time. That has resulted in problems of non-guests or competitors ranting and friends of the lodge raving. Advantage: Booking.
- Filters — Both sites allow you to search for specific content in the reviews. Both have tags to choose from, but TA lets you input your own search term if it’s not available in the tags. Advantage: TripAdvisor.
- Reviewer profiles — You want to know whether the reviewer is an experienced traveler. The number of reviews and number of helpful votes serve as a proxy for experience (as does thoughtful content!) Both sites note the number of reviews for each contributor and the number of helpful votes, if any. But on TA you can mouse-over the reviewer and see her ratings profile — a fair reviewer will show a balance, with few raves and rants and most reviews in the 2 to 4 bubble range. Advantage: TripAdvisor.
You can safely ignore reviews on all other sites.
- Others not as good — Some of them borrow TA or Booking reviews. Others, such as Expedia and Orbitz, have their own reviews, but they’re not as good as our leading sites.
- FAIL: TrustYou — There’s an unfortunate trend for accommodation sites, including Kayak, Hipmunk and Skyscanner, to contract out their reviews to TrustYou.com. TrustYou collects, collates and spews summary ratings with snippets of selected reviews. But TrustYou is really a reputation management service for hotels, so their interest is keeping their clients happy by selling hotel rooms, not warning-off potential guests. You won’t get much dirt from these curated results.
- FAIL: HotelsCombined — HotelsCombined merits special mention for worthless reviews. A random sample (Grand President Bangkok) showed 6 rating bar graphs and 5 “top comments” that totaled 19 words. Yes, that’s right: comments averaging 4 words each. All are positive on a lodge that scored only 6.0. It’s hard to believe anyone could provide reviews with less substance than TrustYou, but HotelsCombined does.
In all these summarized reviews, the useful detail — and almost all the bad stuff — is massaged out of the results. For the discerning traveler, these are not helpful at all.
Private rentals
- Airbnb — Usually extensive reviews. Open filter field available when consulting reviews for a lodge. While you can’t see the guest’s review history, you can look at a profile of the guest. These are sometimes detailed enough to tell if the reviewer is an experienced traveler.
Hostels
- Hostelworld — TripAdvisor and Booking.com do a decent job of reviewing hostels, but Hostelworld has a good database, too. Besides summary scores, there are bar graphs for 7 quality features. Number of reviews by each reviewer cited — you can even click on the number to see all the reviews by that reviewer. Reviewer comments are usually quite brief. Unfortunately, the sortation didn’t work in our test. We wanted to try the unusual sort criterion, “Age group,” as this could be a way to sort out the party hostels from the quiet ones. But the sort didn’t stick and kept reverting to sorting by “Newest.”
- Go to Booking.com — Type the name of the lodge right into the search box (location may also be required). If that doesn’t work, enter the location only, then add the lodge name in the left side filter. Is the lodge listed? If not, switch to TripAdvisor.
- Number of reviews — How many reviews does it have? Smaller, newer and less popular lodges will have fewer, but a few is better than none. If the number is low on Booking, you can still check them, but may want to look at TA reviews as well. Be cautious if there are few reviews on TA, since TA is vulnerable to gaming by friends and competitors of the lodge.
- Recent reviews are best — Reviews should default to the most recent first. Lodge quality can go up or down over time, so limit your scan to reviews less than a year old or at least place more credence in newer reviews.
- Avoid rants and raves — Concentrate on reviews that rate the lodge 2-4 stars, since they are more likely to be balanced and accurate.Ignore the 1-star and 5-star reviews (although a longer 1-star might reveal a glaring problem in glorious detail).
- Look for experienced reviewers — The more reviews a person has contributed, the more likely that his or her experience will produce better assessments. If there are few reviews for a lodge, there may be none done by an experienced reviewer. If so, you can still consider the reviews that do exist, but judge from the writing whether the review is fair and balanced. Longer reviews require more thought, so a quick scroll can pick them out.
- Filter for details — Booking and TA both provide search tags, but they may not include what’s important to you. (Accessibility for disabled travelers is conspicuously missing from most reviews.) TA remedies this by providing an open search box.
For hostels, Hostelworld also meets most of these requirements. For private rentals, Airbnb reviews are good.