Tripadvisor
The Tripadvisor mobile app is available for the Android and iOS platforms. It can be used to create reviews of hotels, restaurants, and to chat with other travelers on Tripadvisor forums.
- Free to use
- Available for the Android and iOS platforms
- Read and create reviews of hotels, restaurants, and local attractions
- Make hotel reservations
- Free to download and use
- More than 300 million users
- Millions of reviews of hotels and restaurants in many parts of the world
- Reviews are all user-generated
- Some reviews are little more than a proclamation of good or bad service
Tripadvisor is the service many people turn to when they need a review of a hotel or restaurant. The company has become very popular since its inception in February 2000, and more than 300 million people use its services. Most of them use the Tripadvisor mobile app to post and read reviews. This company was one of the first to be built on the premise of user-generated content. People can join Tripadvisor and then contribute their own reviews of hotels, restaurants, and local attractions that they have visited. It has become, to some extent, a social media platform, but this is not the intention with which it was designed. The best manner of using the app is to search out reviews of places that one intends to visit. It can be helpful to see the opinions of others. Many reviews accessed by the app are very detailed. They describe things like cleanliness, customer service, and price. It is even common for reviewers to mention specific employees of a hotel or restaurant by name when they receive good or bad service. The app can also be used to make hotel reservations, but these are carried out by a third-party which has partnered with TripAdvisor to offer such services. Tripadvisor itself it not responsible for the rates that may be given when making such a reservation. The biggest drawback of the Tripadvisor app is its user-generated aspect. It can sometimes be difficult to sort through reviews and find one that is fair. There are too many reviews which devolve into the airing of personal grudges or gushing over good service. Unbiased reviews can be found, but they have to be sought out.
TripAdvisor is terrible today,when they started they gave reviews and A lot of great local information and it was not as blatantly commercial. now days whenever you ask for a few it’s associated to a product that they are trying to sell I have little regard for TripAdvisor in the new configuration
I used to use Tripadvisor as a way to evaluate hotels before booking a hotel, but lately have given up on sifting through endless commercial reviews, where the person has obviously not visited the hotel. Also there are no updates on premises which have closed, and their algorithm automatically discards your review if you try to alert travelers of the closure of a place. Now I only look at reviews which are average, or below, in rating. These tend to be the most useful, and give a realistic view of how a stay would be in a hotel. The flight comparison function is now useful however to see different alternative for routing.