Categories
10 Things Travel Websites

When it comes to crowdsourced reviews, which websites should you trust?

Whenever Web Watch wants to try a new restaurant in a new city, we turn to our online resources for hints and tips from the locals — because you should always eat where the locals eat.

Usually, the online reviews we find are relatively accurate.  In one place we ate at recently, the review said to avoid the paella.  We should have listened – it really wasn’t that good.

2013 America's Top Restaurants2013 America's Top Restaurants

But with the myriad of review websites out there, which ones are those that you should trust the most?

A RECENT SURVEY OF REVIEW SITES came out and listed the sites that visitors felt were more trustworthy than other places.  It doesn’t necessarily mean that the reviews themselves were trusted — just the perception is what was being looked at here.

The top trust vote getters were:

  1. TripAdvisor
  2. Zagat
  3. OpenTable
  4. Edmunds
  5. Yelp
  6. Urban Spoon

Does this mean that these sites don’t have fake reviews? Certainly not.  Those are going to exist all over the place.  But you should always take an aggregate view of all available reviews, rather than just reading the top one or two you run across.