http://www.usatoday.com/travel/hotel...htm?csp=Travel

From today's USA Today

That's an interesting article... when you get down into it, the best advice occurs:
• consider regional and cultural differences; American with their gy-normous bathrooms are always complaining about small bathrooms in wonderful tiny European B & B's
• Look for specifics, and be suspicious of people who only post once, to badmouth a place & disappear forever.
• Most of all -- check the FORUMS as well as the Review section. If you use the "search" function on a forum (for instance, on France, choose the Paris section, then use the search slot for Hotel____), you'll find commentary by posters who haven't done a review... but may be just as informative. Example: I've been to Greece 9 times, and am a Destination Expert in the TA Greece forum, but have never posted a hotel review. My bad. But you can find me every week in the forum section, advising newcomers on good hotels to check in variuous places.
• Forums ferret out Bad apples. We regulars can sniff out those people who register ONLY to say something bad OR to ballyhoo a place ... and we see that their entries are erased.

Trip Advisor is like any other service (Wikipedia)... it's big its growing, there may be som errors, but if you give it the time, and do your own check-ups, its valuable. Fodor's Europe Forum is also valuable for narratives, and descriptions of delicious meals and good hotels -- but TA has a broader range. We need both!!

It's so true; you have to do your homework when shopping online. Especially for things like hotels that can make or break a trip. I check both Trip Advisor and Fodor's, and then do a random Google search to see what comes up.
I have had good luck with Trip Advisor reviews, although working my way through all of them can take time. In the end, I've adopted the suggested "Olympic scoring" approach, whereby I disregard anything too kind or too nasty.

IMO, Trip Advisor has been a huge help in choosing properties around the world. After reading enough reviews, you can kind of tell if the writer is "your kind of traveler". I have to agree that between Trip Advisor and Fodors, this is the way we choose our lodgings and restaurants. Have we ever been disappointed? Not really. Occasionly, a place has been a little worse than expected, but more often than not, it has been alot better than expected.

The main thing is to do your homework. Don't expect to choose the perfect place without alot of research. And again, everyone has a different idea of "perfect". Read each review and try and understand where thar particular traveler is coming from. Your Utopia may be another persons slum!

As everything in life you must take the information with some perspective,obviously not everybody has the same values or same taste.
Choosing a hotel after reading a recommendation in one of the forums I do some cross checking, most of the time I have been happy with the hotels. I have the feeling that most of us are very honest in reporting our feelings regarding acomodations.
It is with restaurants that I disagree more because, I do not wish to sound snobbish but there is a great discrepancy regarding what is good food and bad food.
I found this extremely personal,and often I have been disappointed.
It is true that the same place , if it is a small place, can offer very different fare depending of the day of the week ( is the same cook cooking that day or not) and what the customer orders.
In all I am very grateful for great advice mainly in Fodors and also in Tripadvisor.

I personally have trouble with reviews posted online. Anyone can say something about what is good or bad. You do not know that person you do not know what they think is, say comfortable. Example, is a hard mattress more comfortable than a soft one? We all have our own ideas on this. Then there is food. If someone stays at a hotel and has all 3 meals there are they better qualified the say someone who only has breakfast. In any review you never know what they have eaten.
Would someone who can only afford to splash out on a 5 star hotel for one night given a totally unbiased view of the service then say someone who normally stays at 5 star establishments. The former may simply be blown away at the level of service whilst the later may be simply blasé about the level of service.

To sum up; you go not know what is behind any comment, (good or bad). And this not only goes for TA there are more and more websites out there going down this raod in the hope to attract customers.

and the very same things about "reviews posted online" can easily be said about some of the "reviews" posted right here.

TA is not IMO a good source of restaurant reviews, except in trip reports where one can get a flavor of the poster's style. I use Chowhound and other food sites for that purpose.

And I heartily agree with Dukey.

The good thing about TA reviews is simple statistics. Frequently visited properties get large number of reviews and the chance of getting a "true" picture (positive or negative) increases. Also "index" position is useful for frequently reviewed properties. And there are other sources of reviews on the net; booking sites like booking.com, venere.com & others maintain their own.

I think the way to approach this is to identify what is important to an you as individual traveler and try to locate this info in reviews. Of course there are other important facts like price, location, etc that can be established without sifting through a pile of reviews.