We’re looking to book a family trip to a Caribbean resort an I am immensely frustrated by trying to find out what the resorts competing for our business are like. This will only be my second such vacation.
We’re not rich enough to go to a super incredible Beaches seven-star place so some comparison shopping is required. All the “reviews” I can find, however, are customer reviews on travel websites. Almost all are stupid, and are one of the following two types:
[QUOTE=Some guy]
5/5 would go again love it
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Some other guy]
1/5 this was the worst resort ever all the staff spoke spanish or english with a spanish accent the cable tv wasnt very good and all the drinks were watered down so we couldnt stay drunk all day also they wouldnt let us wear bathing suits and flipflops in the formal resterant
[/QUOTE]
(NOTE: Every one of those individual criticism is a real one taken from Tripadvisor.)
Of course the RESORTS all claim they’re paradise on earth.
Damned if I can find real reviews. Can anyone help me out?
I find that reading multiple reviews over the last year or two on Trip Advisor gives a pretty accurate picture. I’m sorry I don’t have a better resource for you.
I often start by searching by destination on the travel sections of major newspapers like the NY Times and Washington Post, then I poke around on Trip Advisor and Yelp. For a specific country, I try to see if there is a forum dedicated to just that country. It helps to triangulate by reading lots of reviews for a single venue.
Having to please multiple personalities will be problematic. I assume you’ll be going some level of AI (all inclusive)? which narrows your choices somewhat. Other than that, exhaustively pore over TA reviews of some of your choices. Eliminate the professional complainers and the breathless fawning, and you might arrive at a useful consensus.
I have to agree with others that your best bet is to pore over multiple reviews, discarding the idiot ones and looking for patterns among those that are literate. Some reviews are worth reading; my husband is one of the top reviewers on TripAdvisor in Asia (which is silly IMHO but they’ve successfully hooked him in - now he posts a review of every hotel he stays at, which a lot because his job involves constant travel through ASEAN countries). Anyway my somewhat poorly made point is that a few reviewers are literate and honest.
You might also try Booking.com. I find the info they give to be quite detailed and reasonably accurate. I’ve booked through them a couple of times after making a selection based on the info they present, and thought they were pretty helpful.
I’ve found with Trip Advisor that it’s pretty easy to tell which reviews are legitimate and which are either from morons or complainers. You might also check out the TA Forum for your destination because folks often post reviews and trip reports there, or there might be posts comparing X and Y resorts that go into some more detail. You could also note which resorts Costco Travel or some other higher end travel agencies use as they tend to do a pretty good job vetting the properties they offer.