Planning a trip to Khajuraho a few years ago, we chose our hotel based on the photos it put up on a popular travel review site. It looked cool and inviting, with big potted plants and their green reflections shimmering in its glass doors. It seemed a capacious space, beautified with ethnic garden furniture, the warm terracotta shades of its objets d’art, an inner courtyard and garden. You get the picture. Just the one for us, cosy, neither too expensive nor cheap. The creepers draping the walls held a promise of fragrance, and the rooms looked plush too. We went through the reviews and made the bookings.

Staggering off the taxi that dropped us there on a hot afternoon, we surveyed the hotel and the locality with a mix of disbelief and horror. It was a small lane, located off a main road alright, as the travel site said, but at the other side was unbeautiful wilderness. On either side were busy stores which sold plastic buckets, rope and other such paraphernalia, while an al fresco snack shop outside the tiny shopping complex across us continuously fried jalebis and pakodas that swarmed with flies. Our rooms, with old pista green walls, resembled those found in lodges near bus stands and railway stations rather than those in hotels. They were clean, though. As our dreams of an upper-middle class holiday haven rearranged themselves to settle at a humbler plane, we sat on our beds and wondered how we had been so naïve.

We had read the reviews, hadn’t we seen travellers’ pictures of the hotel? (It turned out later that travellers’ pictures hadn’t been much more illuminating.)

Truth be told, the hotel and the holiday both turned out fine, but it had me wondering, how do you know that what you see is what you get on travel web sites? How credible are the reviews and what can you do to suss out the genuine ones from the fake, which could be full of praise or hate?

Here are some tips from personal experience as well as from other travellers:

Read the latest reviews, on a number of portals. If there is a particularly bad review, get in touch with the reviewer for more details.

Decide based on what is important to you. The choice of fruit at breakfast is limited? Would that be as much a deterrent as dirty sheets or dirty bathrooms? See if you know anyone who knows someone who lives at the place you are travelling to and cross-check with them.

Look at reviewers’ photos of the place. Look for pictures in which the setting of the hotel is visible. Of course, setting may not signal service quality or comfort, but if you aimed for a restful and idyllic place, you may not like a myriad businesses being conducted outside.

Observe if complaints about uncaring service, antagonistic staff and bad facilities keep cropping up.

Do not take people who have posted less than six reviews seriously. Be equally wary of reviews that gush as well as those that carp. They could have been posted in return for incentives, by really picky guests, rivals or disgruntled former employees.

Professional travel sites have checks in place to guard against/weed out fake reviews. The website on which a review is posted also adds/ takes away from their credibility.

Vitamin C is a weekly dose of consumer empowerment

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW