We have been traveling all over the World for the past 7 years, since I retied. I love to research where we visit, what we see, what hotels or B&Bs that we stay in, as well as restaurants we visit.
I have found that TripAdvisor is a very useful tool in that research, as well as other sources of reviews. However, I don't just look at the overall rating, I dig down into the reviews and in particular the negative reviews. I have found great deals on hotels that had a lot of negative reviews, because nearly all were written prior to the hotel's renovation. We stayed at one hotel near the airport in Miami that had just been renovated and our room was brand new and great. The price was great and so was the restaurant at the hotel.
TripAdvisor has a great feature that allows you to use a map for location (also hold the cursor over the location of the hotel for the price) that is great.
On Cruise Critic (we take a lot of cruises), I always post a review of our trip and cruise. I find other reviews for the exact same cruise that we took. For example, we recently did a great transatlantic cruise from Southampton to Miami on the Celebrity Eclipse. It was one of the best cruises we have ever had. The ship was great. We had a great group of new friends that we socialized and dined with. All of us loved the cruise. Yet, reading 20 reviews of the cruise, I found a couple that rated it very poorly. One said it was the worst cruise ever. Digging down into the specifics of those negative reviews, I found some very petty issues (in my opinion) that those reviews were based on. Still, sometimes I find that someone had a valid complaint for something that I have never experienced. If your cabin toilet keeps backing up creating a nasty odor and the cruise line doesn't fix it quickly, I can see why you didn't like the cruise.
