THANKS to the Internet and its spawns like Facebook and Twitter, everybody’s a critic. But not everybody is a good critic.
Take hotel ratings. Like many other travelers, I have devised my own strange system for choosing a hotel, once I have settled on the location and price range. It encompasses word of mouth, hopeful guessing through past experiences with a given brand and wild speculation based on a haphazard sampling of the copious Internet reviews at various Web sites.
These online reviews, while often entertaining and informative in the aggregate, are typically written by anonymous people — some of whom, for all I know, could be in a federal penitentiary and just killing time with wistful critiques of places they have never seen.
This is not a great system, but hey, adventure is grist for my little mill. There are, of course, professionally compiled hotel reviews, including those published by Mobil and AAA. Both employ legions of trained reviewers who roam the country with clipboards, anonymously checking into hotels to evaluate them on an exhaustive list of criteria. Their reviews, which assign rankings, are typically short and to the point.
Those guides are useful, as are the avalanche of amateur reviews that appear on Internet travel sites like IgoUgo .com (which even provides reader forums and travel journals) and TripAdvisor.com, which has tens of thousands of user-generated reviews of hotels.
I especially value TripAdvisor because, with practice, you can readily sort out the cranks from the vast majority of earnest reviewers who simply want to share their personal views about a hotel stay.
TripAdvisor does not pull punches. Take just two reviews appearing in recent days of a certain hotel in Times Square that heavily promotes itself to budget-minded tourists. “A body bag was pulled out of the elevator,” one unhappy guest related. “To shut the door to the bathroom, we had to unplug the TV,” reported another, cryptically.
Anyway, you would think there would be no room for another hotel rating business. And you would think that would especially be the case now, given the gloom-by-the-room economic conditions in hotels and the slump in travel, in general.
But no. On Monday a new company, Oyster Hotel Reviews, opened its doors online, with a stated goal of becoming the premier source for independent, professionally produced and in-depth hotel reviews. It’s at www.oyster.com.
The plan, said Elie Seidman, the chief executive and co-founder, is to establish a big base of “rigorous and independent” reviews, each about 2,000 words, accompanied by reviewer-produced candid photographs of practically every nook of each hotel.
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