Want to avoid disasters when booking your next hotel?
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Read the reviews. Specifically, I recommend sticking to one-star, three-star, and five-star reviews. They should give you a pretty well-rounded view of what went right and what went wrong for other guests.
But that’s a very basic tip—one that’s easily complicated when you start shopping around for hotels that have hundreds of reviews.
After all, what if two similar hotels have similar ratings and types of reviews?
What types of reviews should you know to listen to?
If you want to cut through the noise and learn how to read hotel reviews reliably, I’ve got a few tried-and-true pieces of advice that’ll help you grade any spot quickly and accurately.
How to read hotel reviews like a pro
Reviews are one of the most reliable ways to gauge how good a hotel is at its job.
That being said, it’s easy to get turned off from a perfectly great stay based on one or two extreme reviews. Here’s what I’ve learned over the years about ranking hotels based on reviews.
Best practices:
- Ignore hyper-extreme comments—whether they’re good or bad. Of course, it’s okay to read through one-star and five-star reviews, but I suggest taking overzealous reviews of any type with a grain of salt.
- Count managerial responses. If a guest leaves a terrible review and the hotel’s management offers a thoughtful, genuine reply, I’m a lot more forgiving. After all, mistakes happen—and companies can learn a lot about their primary demographic when they listen to those negative reviews.
- Timeliness is important. Don’t get hung up on reviews from five years ago… or even a year ago. Generally speaking, stick to reviews that are within the last six months. They’re going to be the most reflective of the experience you’ll have on an upcoming trip. Or if season is a big part of your trip, look for reviews from the same month as your vacation.
- If a review is really high-impact (for good or worse), consider digging deeper. You might even want to look at the reviewer. If it’s their only review, or if it looks like they created an account to spread negativity, the account might not be legitimate—and those reviews aren’t worth your time. You can even use an AI program to help weed through the fakes, if this is really important to you.
- Search strategically for issues that are close to your heart. For me, that’s noise—so I always use a filter search or a keyword search when combing through reviews. Safety is another big one for most travelers, along with family-friendly amenities.
- If a hotel has fewer ratings, it could swing either way. Hotels that have fewer ratings are harder to study—meaning your stay could tilt in either direction. If you’re an optimist like me, that’s not a problem. If you’re more conservative in your decision-making, stick to hotels with at least 70 reviews.
- What about the overall rating? Generally speaking, I suggest sticking to hotels that have an aggregate of more than 70% approval on one website. That being said, it’s normal for hotels to have different ratings on various platforms, such as TripAdvisor compared to Booking. So long as the hotel has a hearty stamp of approval somewhere, and you’ve read and approved those reviews, you don’t need to stick to 5-star stays.
Tips on getting more out of your review-trawling
I glossed over the main points of how to read hotel reviews above—but now I want to lean further into my own tactics. Maybe they’ll work for you, too.
Here are my three bonus tips:
- Be judgy with reviewers—some of them don’t know what they’re talking about. For example, if someone travels to Barcelona and leaves a poor review of a hotel because it didn’t have elevators or its rooms were too small, that’s not a problem with the hotel. That’s a complaint from a traveler who didn’t actually research their destination.
- Consider seasonality. I’ve also seen reviewers complaining about Tulum because algae deposits washed up on the shores of their beachfront hotel. Again, that’s not a problem that the hotel has any control over. In fact, a little research would have told you that sargassum seaweed is basically a guarantee from June to October.
- People coming back to a hotel is the biggest stamp of approval I’ve yet to find. It’s also my own stamp of approval. If guests are coming back, then that’s a golden seal in hospitality.
