Can You Trust Reviews? How to Read Reviews the Right Way When Researching Travel

Using Reviews to Plan Travel

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[00:00:16] Nasreen: Hi, welcome back to another episode of Time to Talk Travel. We have an interesting topic that I think we have a lot to say about that came as a suggestion from one of our friends. So thank you, Jamie. And that is reviews. How do you use them in your travel planning?

How do you know when to trust a review, not trust a review? How to sort through what everyone says online and take the nugget of truth that is going to make your vacation better or worse. So I guess we should just start out with. Do all of us use reviews in our travel planning and how, like, how deeply do you rabbit hole into them?

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It's more about checking to see if it's an actual legitimate review and not like a paid something that, they may not be as honest as they should, Or a bot. I'll look at the reviews profile. The person who did it, I'll click and see okay, have they done a thousand reviews? They go down in my book for that. If they've done 10 or 15, that's more like I've probably left 10 or 15 reviews. I don't write them for kicks.

I write them if I really loved a place or really hated a place. Not normally, if it's just middle of the road.

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So it's rare that you have a This place was really okay review. I rabbit hole. I'm a rabbit holer and it drives my husband absolutely crazy. Cause he will just pull up a site and be like, average review 4.5? Great. I'm in. And I'll be like let's take a look. Of those 4.5 these many look like bots. Of the 25 bad reviews it got, these look like real people, and they're all saying the same thing is wrong. I've become a forensic scientist around reviews, which I don't know if that's always a good thing.

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How far the rabbit hole you go down, how much of a commitment do you have in there? I also look at to see how did they respond. Especially for Airbnb.

You'll have people be like, Oh my God, this broke or this was dirty or whatever. If the owner responds and replies in a way that explains the situation or, stuff happens you can't expect every experience to be perfect. So it's more of like, how did they respond?

And how do they manage those negative and positive reviews? I like it when they also say, thank you so much for staying with us. And we appreciated you leaving this this review, that kind of thing. It does take time to leave those reviews, especially like you said, Des,

I try to do it even if it is mediocre for a stay, because these are people's businesses. If I've met or had good communication with the owner, I will take the time to and I don't, I don't write a novel on it, but I will say, Hey, it was great. It was clean.

It was close. It was good value. Whatever the basics are.

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Knowing that people have been brought to destinations and have maybe been treated and had special experiences that the general public hasn't had. I think we've all had that plate of strawberries with our names written in chocolate, left on the table as we checked into a resort which is fantastic.

Don't get me wrong. I love it. When I'm telling my neighbors they should go stay there, they're not getting the strawberries and the chocolate treatment because they're not writing that review

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It was myself and my two young daughters at the time. They also didn't say that the parking wasn't guaranteed because they had only been allotted a certain number of spaces in the garage until a couple months later. That obviously went in all of my write ups because people needed to know to book parking in advance, but that the issue should be resolved in four months when they had the whole floor that they're supposed to have.

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[00:05:44] Ciaran: I always like to drive by the reviewers house and check out their car and see what kind of school their kids go to and what kind of clothes they're wearing to see if they're on the same page.

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[00:05:57] Ciaran: I'm just, I'm just kidding. I do like, I do like to see are the people reviewing my people, are they interested in the same kind of experience that I'm interested in? Because if they're there for the big game or if they're there for, the hunting and the fishing, like they're not looking at the same things as I am.

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Somebody asked me as a blogger, did I ever leave a negative review, at a place, especially if I was hosted. And I told him, yeah. I was staying, this is the New Yorker Hotel in New York, and I stayed in a room that was comped and it Felt old. It didn't feel like the kind of place my friends would want to stay.

And so I was prepared to write it's showing its age. I sent a note to the manager and said, listen, I just want to be fair. It didn't feel like a great New York hotel. It felt like it was showing its age. And she said, thank you so much for reaching out to me. We're doing a 70 million renovation launching in three months.

Would you like to come to my office and see the swatches of the fabrics that were picked out and stuff? And I said, absolutely. That tells a whole different story. I'm going to be honest with my readers. They're spending their hard earned money based on my opinion and my information. So I'm going to say, it's feeling its age now, but

they're about to make things so much better. And I think that's helpful.

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I'm going to Google that separately instead of reading through 2, 700 reviews and just say, blah, blah, blah, hotel rude staff. And that's going to pop up if there's a trend and I can see it across different review platforms and places or Facebook posts about it or things like that, those results will come.

And I can gauge whether it's a current problem, a large problem, or just a small problem.

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You may have just come and Googled a place, you find this hotel or you find this attraction and then you realize this is for people looking for a deal and this is a luxury hotel. That's not their target audience. Or if you are a luxury traveler and you find yourself at a three star hotel, you're likely going to be disappointed because that's not your bag. That's not what you are looking for.

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I decided to try rom com and I really didn't like it. It's like, why are you giving me three stars? I said, That the book was a rom com and I didn't deliver the thriller experience? What's interesting, what Nas just said about, you look for the trends a lot of review engines now are using AI to notice trends. They will summarize if there's 500 reviews. You don't want to read them all, but they'll say reviewers mentioned the luxury bedding, or reviewers mention negatively the Wi Fi. sometimes, these newer engines that summarize for you can give you a quick view into what people like and what people dislike.

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And you can see a lot of very intricate stories about their time that they put up for their friends and get a different viewpoint, which is one of the reasons I love doing that.

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Are you going on a, girls getaway? Because the reading the review of a restaurant or a hotel that is, family friendly. It's probably not what you're looking for your girl's trip, right? Or if you are taking your kids somewhere, you really probably don't want to find the hottest place for a bachelorette party or have those kinds of.

Vibe at your hotel by the pool, right? Is it spring break and it's full of students and sure. It got great reviews. It's a super fun hotel and a great deal over spring break. But who are you there with, right? Like you want your kids next to the Jaeger shots? Probably not.

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So it's both leaving reviews and reading reviews. I do feel like you have to be a little bit of an expert. You have to be able to discern what's real, what's not real and what's personal and what's coincidental.

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[00:11:37] Maureen: and There are like professional reviewers, right?

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[00:11:41] Maureen: So you can actually find, like you said, Ciaran, people that are your people. Maybe not drive by their house, but you can see where they have stayed or what they have experienced and be like, okay, I trust that person because they have done all these experiences.

I think TripAdvisor has that, I think Expedia has that booking. com. I have a question for you guys. If you went on Airbnb, because this has happened to me a couple times, you go on and they have a new listing and so there aren't any reviews. Would you take the chance or would you be like, nope, I'm going to wait on this one and have somebody else somebody else be the guinea pig?

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So you can see what their reviews are what they liked, what they didn't like. So again, I'll rabbit hole and do a little research. But if there's absolutely nothing, I've heard so many stories about scams and I probably would get a little bit nervous about a listing. That there was no trail whatsoever.

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But I'm more with Ciaran that I would probably find the place that had, 20 good reviews if it's available. My favorites have been I didn't get the reviews from review sites. I read a magazine article and it said, these are the five best Airbnbs for the city.

And I will start there because that means it's going to be a really top notch. Might be more expensive but maybe it's off season. That was my experience in Santorini -favorite Airbnb to date. And it came not from an Airbnb thing, but a Condé Nast article.

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If there's anything I could improve I want that in the review. Please just come and consider it a dry run because A, they don't want to have no reviews and B, they genuinely want to improve. So I've done that a few times for people.

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At dinner parties. We all pull up our Uber ratings to see who has the highest Uber rating and they have to buy a round of drinks.

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[00:14:20] Ciaran: I was in Las Vegas with a bunch of friends. We went to the Neon Museum and it was raining. We took an Uber and the Uber driver claimed that we were drunk, disorderly, and vomited in the back of their car.

Now I was, I think you all know Debbie, I was there with Debbie and my underage daughter at the time, and I was like livid, because he was just trying to get us to pay a cleaning fee. He was extorting us for the money and I took it up the chain and got it removed and didn't have to pay the fee, but it did ding my uber rating.

Otherwise I had this stellar rating.

Oh, geez.

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[00:14:58] Desiree: I have no idea what mine is. I just pulled it up. Okay. I was always a Lyft girl for a while because I was anti Uber until Europe because Lyft wasn't all over Europe. So let me see.

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[00:15:12] Nasreen: Mine's 4. 88.

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[00:15:20] Nasreen: It's up to 5.

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[00:15:22] Desiree: Okay, phew. If it's up to 10, I'd feel bad, but I could take a 4. 93.

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[00:15:29] Ciaran: I'm pulling I, it's re downloading the app. I haven't used it in so long. I know, that's how boring it is.

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I have 4. 95.

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[00:15:40] Maureen: And I have four kids who Uber, so I'm actually surprised that it's decent.

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[00:15:48] Nasreen: I was gonna say, I don't take a lot of Ubers, but

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[00:15:55] Desiree: I wanna see what my Airbnb rating is now, you guys. That's I didn't realize. Okay.

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[00:16:02] Maureen: I know that mine must be decent. I actually don't I don't know how to look it up but I know that when they go into because when you Request to book.

They go in and can see your profile and where you've stayed. And if there's any sort of like reviews back, and when you stay at an Airbnb, they give you the opportunity to review the property or the experience. And then they also can review you.

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Desiree is a wonderful guest, a passionate dynamic and sunny woman. Great communication, left the apartment in perfect order. Then the next one- perfect guests, easy and communication, respectful, proper, and clean, recommended and welcome back at our place. Anytime.

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Hey, they're saying lovely things.

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[00:16:53] Maureen: Yeah. If you need to feel better about yourself if you're a good guest.

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[00:17:08] Maureen: Damn.

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[00:17:10] Maureen: Glad we live all over the country. That's going to take a while.

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It's talking about what age group leaves the most reviews.

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[00:17:50] Nasreen: The largest group is 16 to 24 year olds. So that may be something just to keep in mind when you're looking at reviews because You have to think about the age range. Someone staying in a hotel who's under 24 is going to have a completely different experience in some areas than someone who is traveling with a family.

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[00:18:14] Nasreen: It's in general reviews. So this could be Yelp. It encompasses Yelp as well. We're talking about hospitality in general. But Harvard business school,

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[00:18:27] Nasreen: My son does.

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[00:18:33] Nasreen: They crowdsource though. So he always looks for good, different types of food to eat in cities. And he'll look and see what someone said was good. So people are leaving their opinions.

They're saying the restaurant was great. This dish was awesome. This one wouldn't get it again. It's specific things like that. But the Harvard Business School did a study where they said that a one star increase can contribute to a 5 to 9% increase in revenue. Fun fact.

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[00:18:59] Desiree: Another statistic I found on the TripAdvisor one said the most commonly read reviews deal with safety. Reviews that reveal serious safety incidents are at least 10 times more likely to be clicked on than reviews that do not describe a safety incident.

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But one thing I always keep in mind on some of these other sites where it's Priceline, Booking, any of the ones you can book through. I think that sometimes the experience is skewed by who they booked through. I know I've had a lot of frustrations with Priceline where they said things that a hotel had that they didn't have.

I know, because I travel a lot, that frustration is with Priceline not doing the listing correctly. But somebody else may say the hotel didn't have this and not realize they don't have that and Priceline screwed it up. So I read those ones with a grain of salt.

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Like I always go to the resort's own website to confirm what they actually have. Go buy a deal from another website. Sure. But make sure that you actually check if you care, if it has three pools or free breakfast or what have you.

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People will come out of the woodwork who've been. I was considering going to Burning Man this year or trying to go. It's tough to get a ticket. And so I was asking people what do I need to know? I found out in a quick 10 minutes, I am not prepared for Burning Man this year.

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[00:20:49] Desiree: Yeah. It's a massive undertaking. I want to. I think it sounds adventurous and creative and fun and liberating. But also I've been told you can't count on sleeping in the back of your Pathfinder you need a restroom, you need a place to dispose of.

Anyways, bottom line is, social media can be really priceless in getting a good review and getting suggestions on things to do, places to stay. As bloggers, we used to write about it all the time. And I took it really seriously because I knew I had friends who were going to drop five to 10 grand on a trip based on whether I said this place is amazing or not.

And I didn't want that kind of responsibility. I didn't want to say go you're going to have an amazing time if I didn't think they were.

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[00:21:37] Ciaran: One other thing to consider when you're doing research is recency. We've all been leaving reviews for so long that a lot of the reviews that are out there that are factored into averages are up to a decade old.

People are talking about something that doesn't even exist anymore, a swimming pool that's not there , bedding that, they've long gotten rid of. When you're looking at reviews, when was this review given. Things change so fast in tourism.

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If I am going to drop a lot of money on something and I'm reading the reviews and I'm seeing things about rude staff or it's hard to find someone, the rooms aren't being cleaned regularly, which I take that comment with a grain of salt because a lot of people are told their rooms won't be cleaned everyday but they don't listen. Sometimes I'll look for the job opportunities listings from the hotel or resort to see what they're saying. How ridiculous are their expectations of hours vs pay are or how many positions there were.

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[00:22:42] Nasreen: It is.

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[00:22:48] Nasreen: Sometimes. So let's say a resort has horrible customer service reviews and I go and I say, okay let me see if this is real. There's so many reviews about this. I'll sometimes pop over and type blah, blah, blah, resort jobs. If I look and they're hiring people and saying you must have open availability and work 60 hours a week and they want to pay you $8.25 an hour ? Yeah, they're not getting people who are going to do a great job because that is a desperation job at that point with that type of pay. You have to expect the customer service level is going to be less. So sometimes I just like to see that it's a sustainable travel thing, in my opinion, of whether they're actually taking care of their people or not.

And I'm always curious.

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[00:23:46] Nasreen: I think some of it is, I worked in the coffee industry for years. I was a territory sales manager and I visited resorts and convention centers and hotels and trained their people. And saw where they were treated well and not well, and heard how much trouble they were having hiring or how long they hung on to people.

So that may be why I even go in that direction. It does speak volumes about even things like how quickly they get stuff fixed at the hotel or how quickly an issue is dealt with.

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I got there and things were dirty , run down and the food wasn't very good. Came to learn that they had cut pay and that all of the great employees were now working at another resort down the street. And it all made sense. Had I looked at the hiring, I would have seen that this resort was desperately trying to fill spots for employees and that would have been a huge clue.

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[00:25:09] Nasreen: I might have a little too much in depth knowledge on that one just based on prior jobs, but there were J 1 and F1 all these different types of visas that students from other countries used to come in and work on, even in airports, at coffee shops and things like that. Then

these positions that used to automatically be filled by people on these visas weren't getting filled because that was in timeout. Even ski mountains in Vermont that used to rely on people to come in. It definitely created this additional segment of jobs that needed to be filled that had never been filled by people in the U. S. prior.

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[00:25:47] Desiree: Good to know. Good to know.

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[00:25:54] Ciaran: Sounds like a rom com waiting to happen.

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[00:25:58] Nasreen: Do y'all have last resort pieces or review pieces of advice for anyone who is researching their next trip?

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[00:26:22] Ciaran: Be a part of the solution. And reviews with pictures.

If you can take a couple of pictures of the room, the bedding, the soap like, Hey, this was nice. Or this maybe wasn't the best thing or people should know this. Get a picture,. Pictures are really worth a thousand words when it comes to reviews.

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My friend is in Sedona right now. She sent me this cool bar that's in this train car that has digital pictures of things going by, but it's not going anywhere. I need to go to Sedona to go on that. Now today,

she's actually on a real train going through Sedona and it's a 4 hour wine train. I want to know what her experience is.

So share the videos, inspire people.

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right across from the Trevi Fountain, I posted a video of what it was like to open the window and see this view that everybody else has to stand in the crowds below. People love that.

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If you're researching a destination and you're looking for truly unbiased reviews that maybe people didn't even mean to leave , check out the tag for the restaurant and also the geotag for the location. That's a great way to discover hidden gems that people are just there and they're just checking in.

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Even if you don't have an entire review to leave, , if someone else's review was really helpful to you, you can just leave a comment underneath it.

Like, thank you so much. We went and you were completely right about this because that will boost the review that you gave credence to up higher and have other people see it. And so leaving reviews yourself and saying something that could be improved, or that was a hidden gem, or that you loved about the hotel that they don't really push forward.

Those little nuggets in there help people reading the reviews to get more out of them.

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[00:28:52] Nasreen: Thank you so much for joining this episode of Time to Talk Travel, where we covered reviews, how you should use them and whether you can trust them.

Please join us next week when we talk about another travel topic. Until then, safe travels.

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