World's Best Lists

[JohnK]

Buenos Aires, Udaipur, India and Istanbul in the top ten cities in the world! At least Sydney made the top 10 list.

For hotels rooms even reviews on Tripadvisor and Asiarooms can be meaningless. Out of the tens of thousands of people that stay in a hotel in a year you get 20 reviews of the hotel in the last 5 years. Who has bothered to write a review and do you actually trust their assessment?

 

[BlacKnox]

For hotels rooms even reviews on Tripadvisor and Asiarooms can be meaningless. Out of the tens of thousands of people that stay in a hotel in a year you get 20 reviews of the hotel in the last 5 years. Who has bothered to write a review and do you actually trust their assessment?

I would not lump tripadvisor and asiarooms together. Asiaroom reviews are limited to those who have booked and paid for rooms through their service. They are very diligent in following up (their own) customers after their stays with reminders etc to comment. And I find reviews of their hotels quite frequent.

Tripadvisor on the other hand is a free-for-all, with limited (non-existant?) checks and balances about who reviews what.

 

[StevePER]

Who has bothered to write a review and do you actually trust their assessment?

I bother to write reviews on TripAdvisor and in general I find their reviews reasonably close to the mark. Obviously the more reviews they have, the more accurate it's going to be so if it only has a couple you need to take it with a grain of salt.

I find TripAdvisor most useful in finding smaller places that you otherwise wouldn't bother with. The most memorable place we stayed at on our recent trip was a tiny B&B in Puerto Iguazu, Argentina. If it wasn't for the reviews on TripAdvisor we would have paid a similar price to stay at a large but very average hotel. Similarly we wouldn't have stayed at this hotel in Cusco, Peru without reading the reviews but it was fantastic (and actually won two awards in the 2008 list). Both of these properties have a huge number of reviews on TripAdvisor which reflects their popularity.

 

[BlacKnox]

I bother to write reviews on TripAdvisor and in general I find their reviews reasonably close to the mark. Obviously the more reviews they have, the more accurate it's going to be so if it only has a couple you need to take it with a grain of salt.

A very valid point StevePER. Many internet models have replicated and proven the power of numbers in determining truth. For particularly obscure locations I agree that tripadvisor provides a valuable resource. However assuming everything else is even, I rate asiarooms e.g. over alternative sites for obvious reasons.