5 Review Sites To Help You Find The Perfect Hotel

Varun Kashyap — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 16:01:37 +0000

Here are 5 sites you can refer to the next time you are planning a holiday or a business trip and you need to search for hotels.

Share your videos and you can even make some money!

TravelPost

TravelPost gives you unbiased hotel reviews and ratings as they are written by actual visitors. What’s more TravelPost has some information about the traveler as well (like budget and purpose of travel) so that you can compare your needs and the reviewer’s requirements and decide accordingly if the review is from your perspective.

The coverage is pretty good and the site also offers other functionalities like travel news, searching for deals and other such things.

TVtrip and Trivop

TVtrip and Trivop are your videoguides to hotels. If you’ve ever booked a hotel online, only to get there and find out that the images very cleverly showed only the best parts of the hotel, then check out the videoguides (although videos can be misleading as well). This also eliminates a lot of misinterpretation
caused by either lack of expression on the reviewer’s part or misinterpretation on your part in case of text reviews.

The basic workings are similar, locate the place you are traveling to on the Google Maps Mashup or use the search functionality, a list of potential hotels will appear, click on one to view further details :

Tripr

Tripr is a videoguide with a difference. Tripr shows you ‘real’ video reviews, made from a consumer’s point of view, because customers can make a video of the place they stayed at and upload it to Tripr. The concept thus gives a first hand customer perspective on the facilities. What’s more, if you upload a video to Tripr, you can get paid!

When your video results in a booking you will receive a commission for your video! There are some guidelines as to how the video should be shot and what all it should include.

TripAdvisor

Although an all-in-one-place to get advice on your trip, if it’s only hotels you are looking for then you won’t be disappointed at TripAdvisor. It lists the hotels in the city you are looking for. You can then read reviews for the hotels. You can even find lots of information about the destination, restaurants, things to do etc with TripAdvisor.

Do you know of some other sites that offer similar functionalities? Have you used one in the past? Share your experiences and thoughts in the comments.

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3 Must-check Traveller Websites before your Next Trip

Anthony — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 03:08:10 +0000

All of us take at least one trip annually, whether it be locally or overseas. As much we love them, most of us aren’t able to have trips very often. Whether it’s work, school, financial problems, there is always something that holds us back. Thus when we finally get a chance to get out it’s in our best interests to take necessary precautions to ensure that the next trip is a success. Many factors that ruin good trips include delays, insufficient information about the place you are visiting and just plain old loneliness. Here I would like to introduce to a number of useful websites that can help you make your next trip a better one.

Insufficient information for your trip?

Try WikiTravel

WikiTravel is a user-powered travel guide. There are about 18,000 travel guides and articles written and edited by regular travellers from around the globe. You can find pretty much anything here. So if you’re looking for relatively non-biased destination reviews definitely check it out.

There is one other emerging website that I want to mention here. Chokti is a YouTube-inspired site where you can find virtual tours of places you are planning to visit. At the moment there are about 1200 video/audio tours there. Mostly submitted by users themselves. While it’s highly unlikely that you’ll find a video tour of some remote village in India here, it does cover most of the major cities. Chokti does not require an account – however if you plan to upload videos, you need to register.

Hotel Reviews

For hotel review, pics, and map locations I recommend TripAdvisor. Not always true and objective, but usually offers enough info to get a basic idea. If photos are not enough and you want a visual preview of the hotel then try TVtrip, Trivop and Tripr.

Lonely on your trip?

Try Dopplr

Dopplr is essentially a virtual travel log. It allows you to add friends, share your travel schedule with them and discover other people with similar travel plans. It includes an action-feed on your profile page that shares all your current travel activity with all your friends. In addition to comparing travel schedules with friends, Dopplr also allows you to link your Dopplr account with Facebook and share travel activity with Facebook buddies.

Another useful feature Dopplr has to offer is picture sharing. It allows you to link your profile to your Flickr account and share travel pictures with friends and family. Registration is absolutely free, and they rarely send you emails so there’s no need to worry about “Great Offers” or “Daily Newsletters”. Check out Dopplr infocommercial below:

Delays on your trip?

Try FlightStats

Weather and air traffic make travelling a pain. With flight stats, you’ll know of any flight delays and weather issues BEFORE you leave for your trip. We have already briefly mentioned it here.

Flight Stats uses a cool map in which all major airports are mapped out and color-coded. The colors represent the Flight Delay Index which is based on weather conditions and data sent out from the airports themselves. Red representing major delays and green representing smooth flying. Upon clicking on the dots, you’ll receive more detailed information about the airport in question, such as the exact temperature and the weather conditions.

A sub-feature of the map is the weather overlay. With this feature activated, it is possible to view cloud conditions overhead and predict beforehand if there will be any delays.

If you usually leave for the airport a hour and a half before your flight, you can glance at the ticker-tape at the top of the webpage that shows minute-by-minute delay updates on major international and domestic flights.

Some other included tools are mobile/email updates, real-time flight tracker, airport information, etc.

Other

Not so long ago Aibek published 10 travel websites that should be bookmarked. Check it out as well, there are a number of really useful tools there. These include ATM locator, Taxi fare estimator, public-transport maps and more.

(By) Anthony is a student, blogger and a distance runner. In his free time, he enjoys running track, and sifting through the web. Drop by his blog at Radicitus, Dude!