Read Reviews… With A Grain Of Salt

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Meggan: hey everyone. Welcome back to another fun and fabulous episode of Travel Tip Tuesday with us. Travel mug, podcasters, I guess we would say . So this week I wanted to talk about reviews, and I think we've, you know, all come to learn and hopefully you're all doing this, but before, like going places or booking stays anywhere really um, where you're gonna be purchasing something in particular I definitely encourage you to take a quick peek at user reviews.

So whether that's a restaurant, a hotel, an Airbnb, a tour, whatever the case might be. So if you aren't doing this, you should start and if you are, carry on. But I wanted to mention something to keep in mind in regards to this. So reviews are often written when someone is had, you know, something to complain about. You know, we're all, we're angry, so we wanna. Express that. So when people are wowed, I mean they do leave reviews sometimes, but oftentimes it's people who've had a bad experience and they want to voice their concern.

Jenn: Mm-hmm. .

Meggan: So what I wanted to share about reviews is, of course it's important, but you should check more than one place. So we used to rely heavily on TripAdvisor for reviews, and I have found over time they've gotten more negative, or they seem contrived, like the business said to people, Leave us a review, and the people just sort of felt obligated to do so.

Jenn: Mm-hmm. .

Meggan: And so that the reviews seem a little canned. And I mean, maybe the place deserved the negativity that they got in the review, but before I make a decision, I wanna check out more than one site to be sure. What's, what's the story here? So Yelp is a good one still. Another great one though is Google Maps. I mean, I think I've talked about this before, but Google Maps has so many functions. I should really just marry Google Maps.

Jenn: You should.

Meggan: I know. So, or they should sponsor the show. So Google . There we go.

Google Maps actually aggregates comments from around the webs plus not the web. The Web Plus ones are added of course, right in Google Maps, so it gives you a variety of sources all in one place. You don't have to look around quite as much because of that aggregation. I mean, for us, we've chosen restaurants, hotels, car rentals, just based on reviews and internet scores.

Because if you don't know, you don't know. Like, I've never been to these places, so how do I know which place I should choose?

Jenn: Mm-hmm. .

Meggan: So one thing I do wanna mention, however, with reviews, that's really key. If you see a lot of reviews for a business with reviewers, with only one review. So they've not reviewed anything else ever. They don't have a profile picture. You click on them. It says, no other information found. What you can maybe take from that is that it could be a friend, a family member, or even the business owner creating profiles and making fake reviews.

So what I always try to do is I try to look for someone who is what's considered a local guide. On Google Maps or that has multiple reviews because you then know it's probably more legit. Mm-hmm. . Sort of to finish things off, if you do see a trend of really bad reviews, I mean probably trust it. But if you see a few negative ones, pepper here and there, those could be people with impossibly high standards. Or it just wasn't for them, so it likely would be okay to book. So if they're just sprinkled, I usually, I usually think that that's okay.

So either way, if you are reserving travel related products of any, you know, sort so car, hotel tour, without reading reviews, you're really kind of taking, in my opinion, an unnecessary risk when you could simply read reviews and really get more insight on what you're purchasing. Mm-hmm. Jenn, do you guys sort of rely on reviews, read reviews? How do you sort of go about that when you're booking travel?

Jenn: Yeah, I definitely read reviews when it comes to like, places to stay. Like hotels. Another reason why I like hotels.com is there is a lot of reviews on there from people, so that one's really good. But I don't usually look at reviews for like restaurants.

This past trip in Scotland, we did a bit more, mostly because we had to book reservations, which is not something that we've usually done in the past. So like Ryan would kind of go on Google and look at the restaurants that were around and look at the reviews, and so that way we did. But definitely for hotels, like anything that you're spending a good chunk of your vacation budget on, you should definitely be checking out their reviews. And like you said, people do tend to write more. When they have a negative experience versus when they have a positive experience. So I think this is also reminding me that I should write reviews when I have a good experience because that should be shared. Another place that I like to kind of check out reviews is travel blogs.

Meggan: Yeah,

Jenn: you do have to be careful that they're not. Do have to careful that it's not sponsored or, I mean, sometimes it's sponsored and people are really honest.

Meggan: Yeah,

Jenn: I've seen that as well. But just kind of be careful and take it with a grain of salt. But it travel blog is a good place to get more information versus, you know, the little reviews are just like a paragraph versus a travel blog is gonna be a whole page basically.

So yeah, I think that's kind of, my tips.

Meggan: Yeah, no, I like that too. Yeah, there's, there's a lot of places you can find out information and I just think you're going in, you know, blind to, like you mentioned something you're spending a large chunk of your travel money on, you really should try to find places, you know, that are offering insight and information.

But again, double check those as well because there's a, a lot of stuff happening out there, you just never know. Yeah. You know well that is it for this week's travel tip Tuesday. And speaking of reviews, wink, wink we would love it if you would leave us a five star review of course on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

It really does help the show and we'd love to hear from our listeners with any feedback, honestly. You can also find us on Instagram and Facebook at Travel Mug Podcast. Our beautiful website, travel mug podcast.com. And if you want to further support our efforts, you can buy us a coffee. The link is in the show notes and we would love that too.

And thanks so much everyone. Bye.