www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... CMP=twt_gu Interesting reading

www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... CMP=twt_gu Interesting reading

There's a lot of truth in that, especially the bit about restaurant and hotel reviews and sites like TripAdvisor - I mean, does anyone actually take anything they read on TripAdvisor as gospel ?

Each year when I book hotels for our little bike ride sojourn I often don't have a choice in where to place a dozen males who need food and beer after 40 or 50 miles of bike riding, so I just pick the nearest town and find any hotel with six bedrooms going free - its harder than you think when the whole point of the ride is to get away from civilisation.

Without fail, every time I have done this I have afterwards gone to TripAdvisor to see what the comments are like and without fail everyone describes the places as horrible, overpriced, dirty, rude staff, etc etc etc.

All anonymously of course, although not so anonymous to TripAdvisor who rely on miserable s to promote their site to advertisers.

Without fail every hotel that we have stayed in has been fine, maybe not 5 star fine so that you'd take your wife on a luxury weekend break, but sub £40 fine so that its got a bed, hot shower, food and beer and thats what we expected when we booked it, fine.

And on every occasion I take time out to write a review which points out to the moaning s that we found it very acceptable for what we booked and what we expected for the price and that maybe if they expected room service and a choice of fine wines they should have dipped their hand a little deeper in their stingy wallets.

my mates wife works for one of yorks top hotels. they got some awful reviews and it it was one of there rival hotels!!!!

i use trip advisor when booking holidays and find its useful. you always got complaints but if 85% think its good you can usually take it as a decent hotel

Trip advisor is full of people moaning about the quality of the hotel. My mate has just booked a week all inclusive in Portugal for 290 him and his lad. The hotel has been slated on trip advisor for not. Even up to the standard of a 4star hotel. The rate he got is not a special rate, just what it costs. What do people expect when they get cheap hotel. My mate is quite happy with the hotel as he understands the principal of getting what you pay for.

Must be good then..............you've had more holidays than Judith Chalmers & Alan Whicker put together.

My wife and daughter work in a three star hotel with 50 rooms to fill, their room rates are from £100 to £150 a night and normally their comments are very good, their work is inspected all the time and the management are very particular about guests comments.

All is fine until they hit a quiet period and decide to put some Groupon offers on to fill the rooms, Groupon works, they can go from half a dozen bookings for next weekend to a full hotel within two days if they put a 50% voucher on there - but then the complaints come in.

It bizarre that when you fill a hotel with people paying the full rate you get nothing but compliments, but fill it with people who have booked on a discount voucher and they'll p[iis[/is and whine all weekend.

"An internet troll's opinion should carry no more weight than graffiti"

This should be the standard response to every post from Keith Swiftcorn hereafter.

I bet the reviews get worse after you have been there old lad
I always find you get what you pay for

That's why we have to keep standing up to the unbalanced negative postings

damn right. thats what i work and ref saturday and sunday for

They used to say 'Don't believe verything you read in the press'.
I suppose the modern day equivalent has to be don't believe anything you read on the internet.

For a 3 star

Years ago, before the Internet, I read a book which had a vision of the future with an information network called the Web of Lies. How true.

There was a C4 documentary about some of the contributors to Trip Advisor. The people they featured had made it their life's work to travel around the country and ruin people's business's so they could show how "clever" they were. A revealing insight into the minds of the self obsessed. Small people, small minds, small lives.

I use Trip Advisor both as a contributor and for advice. I am always honest and as accurate as I possibly can be while trying to be as unemotive as possible.

I have always found that, without exception, if you take a majority of the reviews posted then you’ll be about there. For example if 90% of the reviews say that somewhere is good then generally it is good. As previously mentioned, these reviews are posted by unqualified, anonymous people and are therefore to not infallible and you’ll always get varied opinions. But on the whole if you go with the majority it’s usually accurate.

What you also have to remember is that people are far more likely to leave negative feedback than positive.