>On many of the forums agents or spouses of agents are allowed
to tout/scam as "destination experts" sanctioned by mods for
money.<

Please provide your reference point for this Qwovadis. This is a serious alleged breach therefore I need the source from which your comments came. Then I will take it forward.

Joe

Don't hold your breath Joe.

I use TA also and like most of you, disregard the "one" contributor. I pay attention to the reviews that really talk about the room and the pluses and minus, esp. if they add photos.

I review the places I stay and try to make accurate discriptions and usually have photos to post also. I think TA is VERY useful and hope travelers continue to post. We can usually ferret out which are real and which are not.

Sandy (in Denton)

I like TA hotel reviews in that, unlike Fodor's , you can pm the reviewer to ask more questions.
This practice as well as Olympic scoring al la Adu and elimination of one time posters, has served me very well. If reviews come from frequent posters you can get a sense of their sensibilities from their posts and judge accordingly.
As in all things, caveat emptor.

That said, TA restaurant reviews are less than useless.

That said, TA restaurant reviews are less than useless.>>

that's a shame, I've posted a few of them!

I agree with the majority here, TA can be a valuable resource, to be used with discretion and common-sense. I cross-check with the reviews on sites like booking.com and venere and look for trends - if one person says it's noisy/dirty/they got bad service I'll probably ignore it; if two of three say it on different sites, I'll pay more attention, and if several people say it, I'm out.

It's on the Internet; take it with a grain of salt. When I was making plans for a month-long trip to France and Italy, I looked for corroboration for any review either excessively positive or negative. As the saying goes, one swallow does not a Spring make.

We're planning to start up our Niagara-on-the-Lake based GPS tours next Spring but the very LAST thing we want is unsupported positive reviews. I'd much rather have an honest qualified review than a dishonest one. Better to have a 'We like it but.....' than 'It was wonderful. Everyone should do it' kind of dishonest review.

Just my two bits Canuck. YMMV.

u

oops, annhig, perhaps my statement is too global. : (

But looking at what is said about restaurants I know well, I almost always feel we are not talking about the same place at all.

I like tripadvisor,and have gleaned lots of useful info from the site. I look for trends in the posts, and most of them have been spot on. I also like the traveler photos.

I don't automatically dismiss a one-time poster, particularly if the review is a balanced one. Besides, every frequent poster was a one-time poster at some point.

I agree about the traveler photos. I LOVE it when people post their snapshots of the hotel room, view, pool, etc. These tell you more than any hotel website or even someone's written review can. I do contribute hotel reviews occasionally myself. And yes people do PM you, even years later, to ask more about the hotel. I'm happy to ansewr. You can't get find 1st hand information than that!

OK, let me rephrase my opinion of first time posts. I recently was checking out a place and it was rated very highly. But when I looked at the reviews, almost every single one was a first time poster. A few were made by people who had made a handful of reviews and none of them were from someone who had posted a lot of reviews. That really set off my inner skeptic and I suspected that a lot of this posts are planted.

If only a few of the posts are from first time posters, however, I will look at them. I give more weight to people who have made multiple posts, but I'll look at single time posters to see how they jibe with the other reviews.