Reading Reviews

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There are quite a few sites out there that allow other passengers to post their reviews for cruises, destinations and activities they have been on. They are an invaluable resources because the reviews will often provide information and opinions that you may have never thought about, or that can greatly enhance your experience. Over the years though, I have noticed a problem with reading them. You will often times read one glowing review and the very next review on the same item will just be slamming it. How do you know who to believe? Because of that, I thought it would be a good idea to give you some tricks for getting the most out of these reviews.

Read on a curve: What I mean is if you find a review that is horrible where the person just didn’t like a single thing, or if you find one that just raves about everything and everyone with no complaints or negative comments at all, just ignore them. Those reviews are worthless because I can almost guarantee you that there are some extenuating circumstances you aren’t hearing about. Maybe they got into a fight with their spouse and they were mad the whole time, or maybe they were on their honeymoon and were seeing everything through rose colored glasses. Either way, the reviews are biased and aren’t worth much. It is almost impossible that everything will be really good or really bad. What you are looking for are unbiased and realistic opinions.

Look for common denominators: If you see one review where something was good or bad, take that with a grain of salt. If you start to see a pattern where many of the reviews repeat the same sentiment, then you really need to take that seriously and decide if it you feel it will be a problem if you encounter the same thing. Try to place more emphases on the reviews that provide specifics instead of speaking in generalities. Just saying the service was bad could mean one person was rude to them, or it could mean that the entire staff was unfriendly in general. That is a big difference. One would be worth looking at other options and one was possibly a fluke.

Get specific: If you are looking at Cruise Lines or hotels, read reviews for the specific ship or location of that hotel, instead of just a brand as a whole. The basic theme and structure may be the same, but keep in mind that they are all run by different people and each of those people will have different priorities and different standards. That will become very apparent when you start reading the reviews. Along those same lines, try to read reviews that are fairly recent. If it’s an old review they may have changed because of bad reviews and customer feedback. 

Consider who is doing the review: If someone has had problem, is it a legitimate complaint, or did they just pick the wrong cruise, airline, hotel, destination or season? If they didn't plan and book the right vacation for themselves, then odds are, they just made a bad choice. What may not be fun for them, may be exactly what you are looking for. Or what they did enjoy may not matter to you at all. Think about what they did or didn’t like and ask yourself; did they plan the right vacation for themselves?

Along those same lines, you want to find reviews that are written by other travelers that seem to have the same preferences as you do. As you are reading the reviews, ask yourself, “Would I have felt the same way as this reviewer if this has had happened to me?”. If you start noticing that a specific reviewer is interested in things that you aren’t or vice versa, then move on to the next review. These reviews are only useful to you if the other person reviewing it has similar preferences, interests, and expectations.

Best Advice: the best advice I can give someone though is not to take online reviews as your only or primary source.  Ask your friends, family, coworkers and travel specialist their thoughts.  The more you know about someone, the more you can relate them back to what you would enjoy.