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| Alderbrook Resort and Spa proudly displays its TripAdvisor rating |
With TripAdvisor, however, the key phrase is ADVISOR. We use the site to help us make a decision; it doesn’t make the decision for us.
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| Hotel Electra Palace - Athens The pool, our room and our balcony were stellar! |
Take the Athen’s Hotel Electra Palace where we spent our last night in Greece, for example. We booked it while on the road, just a few days before our arrival because of the great -- for a big city – rate of $204USD.
But we didn’t book until we’d checked maps to make sure of its location and TripAdvisor. (We found a 1,000+ reviews of which more than half were ‘excellent’ and another 300+ were ‘very good’.). And those contributing ‘Trip Advisors’ didn’t steer us wrong! We will definitely stay there again.
In the last few years we’ve noted not only a growing reliance by fellow travelers on the website, but a similar reliance by restaurants and guest accommodations on all user-review sites, such as TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Google Reviews.
Have you seen the “Find us on TripAdvisor” or “If you liked (your stay, your meal) please write about your experience on TripAdvisor,” notices as you’ve traveled? Stickers on doors and windows, certificates on display?
The growing importance of web sites was illustrated well at this restaurant in Heraklion, Crete. While it was eye-catching and made us laugh. . .we didn’t eat there because we had another favorite place just down the street.
Another restaurant outside Plakias, on Crete’s southern coast, also boasted of its Trip Advisor recommendations, but we’d decided to eat there long before we noticed this sign.(You can probably tell by the looks of this vegetarian meze plate why we chose to eat there!)
When planning a trip what resources to you use? Have a favorite 'go to' source you want to recommend? Tell us about it in the comments below.
