Hotel Reviews: Who Exactly Should You Believe?
When you want to book reservations at a quality hotel, it is important to find out as much as you can about the hotels that are available in the area where you plan to stay prior to making your reservations. In order to do this, you will want to find hotel reviews on each of the available accommodations. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to know which hotel reviews can be trusted, and which have been purchased by the hotels in question.
This is not a new phenomenon. Businesses have been paying for positive reviews of their companies for decades. It's quite a brilliant strategy, actually; but if you're looking for honest hotel reviews, it can be difficult to know how to sort the real hotel reviews from the paid-for hotel reviews. Distinguishing between the two does take a little bit of work and practice, but if you don't mind doing a bit of homework before you make your final decision, learning to tell the difference isn't really all that hard.
Recognizing Paid Reviews
The first thing that you need to do when looking through hotel reviews is look to see what medium they have been posted on. Many people are paid to post glowing hotel reviews on blogs and other user-generated content sites. If these are the types of sites you are looking at, start by checking the user name of the person who has left the review. If you find several hotel reviews all made by either the same user, or made by someone named "Anonymous", you can almost guarantee that the hotel reviews have been paid for by someone. The majority of hotel reviews posted by actual travelers will have their real names attached, or at least their first names and last initial.
The next thing to watch for to decide whether the hotel reviews you are finding are honest, is to run key phrases within the reviews themselves through your favorite search engine, and see just how many times the same review appears on the internet. Once you have done this a few times, you'll be better able to spot paid hotel reviews whenever you search for a particular hotel, simply by looking to see how many of the descriptions in the search engine results look the same or similar.
There are plenty of honest hotel reviews out there for you to find if you simply learn to ignore the paid ones. Once you learn to tell the difference between types of hotel reviews, you should have no trouble picking a hotel for your next trip.
