Hotel Reviews and Trip Advisor - be careful

My spouse and I both have used and continue to use the references made by multiple travelers on Trip Advisor to various restaurants, hotels and other sites around the world. I know how difficult it is in many cases to decide on where to stay and/or eat while in a completely new to you city (and in many cases culture). Thus the service provided by TripAdvisor is certainly well meant and useful.

Having said that we have come across some alarming incidents on that site — as I am writing this posting, my spouse is getting her next trip to Beijing organized. Since we moved back to the States, both of us have done numerous trips and in a true sign of how fast China and Beijing are changing, we have started looking into new hotels as the ones we knew so well have either raised their prices or have not been renovated, or we just wanted to find out some new / exciting hotels. So today we were checking out Hotel G on Trip Advisor and came across some pretty disturbing findings…The hotel is ranked very well — one may think Way too Well — if you follow the link you will find that it has 50 Excellent reviews!!!

Let me put it this way — this has not happened in our experience — we have not seen such extremely high marks for any of the hotels we have stayed at. And we have stayed in some excellent hotels! China World (Beijing) for example does not have as good reviews as the “fabled” Hotel G……

Needless to say, this is very suspicious. When we dug into the situation we came across some information that Hotel G has been pumped up by someone closely linked with the establishment…..So this is a word of caution about using Trip Advisor (and any other reference material on the Web for that matter) — always try to verify information if possible by using more than one source.

Before we came across this issue with Hotel G in Beijing — we actually started summarizing information about hotels in Asia — here is the link (or you can just search for “hotel” and “review” on this blog)

I hope you can find what you need with good reliability, and as always — have a good trip!