Have You Ever Used TripAdvisor®?

When selecting or booking hotels there are a lot of internet companies that you can select. If you are a frequent traveler you are familiar with Travelocity, Expedia, Hotwire, Hotels.com and there are many more. I have found that some of the ratings and visitor comments on these sites are sometimes a bit suspect. For several years I have been using TripAdvisor which can be found at www.tripadvisor.com.

The site can be used in a couple of different ways. If you know the name and city of a hotel you are interested in, you just type it in on the search line at the top of the website. They will then give you access to all the reviews and information they have about the hotel. All of the reviews are written by people who have stayed at the hotel. TripAdvisor claims that they are receiving 16,000,000 + hits a week, and goodness knows how many reviews are being written (they say over 10,000,000 reviews are on the site). Yours truly is registered with TripAdvisor and I have written reviews, particularly on hotels we used last year in Mexico.

When you access the reviews you will find that the most recent evaluations are at the top, and as you go down the list they are older, but always dated as to the time of posting. Some of the reviews are priceless, both good and bad. Some of the evaluations are really opposite, so you have to read between the lines as to what the writer thinks is important.

The other way the site can be used is just to put in a city that you are interested in. That option is the next section below the search. You can enter your dates, price, and the currency you want quoted for the room rate. When you hit the “find hotels” the site gives you all of the hotels that they recommend and the average room rate. Down the page you will see listings of the evaluations. Just click on the first one and you can read all the evaluations for the hotel. For each hotel they give the TripAdvisor Popularity index and the traveler rating based on the number of reviews.

One nice advantage of the search for hotels is that on the left of the hotel listing it gives you a place to map the hotel, check photos of the hotel, and check rates. The rate box is very helpful as it gives you a chance to compare prices with several booking sites not connected in any way with TripAdvisor. As an example when writing this article I was looking at hotels in Christchurch, New Zealand and the options for the hotel I looked at were Hotels.com, Expedia, HotelClub.com, and RatesToGo.com. If you wish to book a hotel, you then can do so right on the referred to booking site.

The TripAdvisor site has a lot more features which you might want to explore when you are navigating their choices. I recommend you take a look and start exploring your travel options.