Should you trust online hotel reviews? Imagine you've just decided to take a trip abroad (maybe to Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic?), and one of the first things you do is go online to check out which hotels have gotten good reviews. There are countless websites that serve this purpose and offer information and reviews for any hotel, anywhere in the world. But can you really trust that these reviews are accurate? Should you trust them? Maybe go to TripAdvisor, which is the largest travel site in the world where anyone with a profile (which can be set up for free) can write a review of hotels, restaurants, tours and so on. According to TripAdvisor, they only give “…trusted advice from real travellers…”*, and the website received more than 150 million reviews in 2013 alone! That's 410,958.90 reviews per day or 17,123.9 reviews per hour or 285.38 reviews every single minute...if I'm not doing the math wrong. TripAdvisor has 1,939 employees**, however it's difficult to say exactly how many of these are actually employed to read all these reviews and verify that they are honest and that they are written by people who have actually been to the place reviewed. Online reviews, which can be found on TripAdvisor for example, are incredibly powerful and one negative review can potentially destroy a business's reputation and subsequently cause it to go out of business... well, out of business. All it takes is one (or a few) negative reviews to cause irreparable damage, after which it may not matter that the same business has hundreds of glowing reviews. It's always that bad seed that ruins the harvest! In reality, anyone can provide a review: anyone, from honest travelers to dishonest employees of the hotel/restaurant/tour in question, who feels mis...... middle of paper... ...the consumer, not has no way of knowing whether a review is authentic or fake... unless it can actually spot fake reviews. On the other hand, websites such as booking.com, Kayak, Expedia and hotels.com publish "verified" reviews, meaning only people who have a confirmed reservation and who have actually stayed in a hotel can write a review about it. **In the end, however, it is good to remember that reviews can never be considered 100% absolute. Just because a person had a bad stay at a hotel doesn't necessarily mean you can't have the time of your life there, right? Personally, I think if you travel somewhere on vacation without too many expectations and focus on the If there is any positive in the fact that you finally have the chance to travel, to have some time off from work, to have the opportunity to experience something new... then you can't go wrong. Or you can?