Hotel ratings used to be found in travel guides, but now most people look for them online. Different rating organizations use diamonds, stars, smiley faces, or numbers. Online rating companies include Expedia, Hotwire, and TripAdvisor. Independent review sites can provide a more detailed picture of a hotel’s quality.
There are many places to find hotel ratings and now most people look for them on the internet. It used to be more common to look up how hotels were rated in special travel guides published by companies like Mobil, Michelin or AAA (American Automobile Association). When people planned to travel, they could go to their local AAA office, and if they were members, they could pick up books about the areas they planned to travel to and find out which hotels and motels were most favored by AAA. Each property was, and still is, graded by diamond count, and higher diamond properties are considered higher quality.
Other rating organizations may use stars, smiley faces, or numbers as hotel ratings, and usually, the higher number of these represents a hotel or motel that has more amenities and is of better quality. It can get confusing when people start comparing the same hotel across multiple rating services. They will not always be ranked equally with every assessment organization.
Some of the leading online hotel rating companies include the following; Expedia, Hotwire, Travelocity, PriceLine, Orbitz, Hotels.com, Sidestep, TravelPost and TravelWeb. There are other companies to look out for as well. Most of these companies make their profits from booking hotels, so ratings need to be taken with a grain of salt. On the other hand, if companies book customers into unsatisfactory hotels, customers are unlikely to use their service again. There is therefore some incentive to give accurate ratings of hotels.
Some of these companies also offer satisfaction guarantees, which can be useful for consumers looking for evaluations of a specific type or certain services. If a hotel boasts wireless Internet service, for example, and actually doesn’t have it, some hotel rating firms will either book customers elsewhere or offer them money. It remains in these companies’ best interests to make sure that customers are satisfied with the hotels they use.
Those looking for hotels shouldn’t just look at hotel ratings with big hotel reservation and discount companies. Another way to gauge hotel quality is by evaluating customer reviews of various vacation spots through companies like TripAdvisor. On this site, and others like it, people who have actually stayed in the hotels or motels review them for the benefit of other customers.
These independent review sites can provide a more detailed picture of what it is like to stay in a certain place and could help prevent people from staying in various hotels or motels that are not of good quality. Again, such ratings can be skewed, and a single bad rating doesn’t necessarily mean a hotel is poor, but many ratings suggesting lack of service, lack of attention to cleanliness, or other faults could be a good sign that customers should look elsewhere. for a hotel with more favorable reviews.
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