Taipei Hotel Booking with Trip Advisor – Review

Trip Advisor is one of the most popular travel sites in the world. Travelers can’t book directly through the website and are often redirected to other booking sites to do that, but here they can see reviews on hundreds of thousands of hotels, attractions and restaurants around the world. The way it’s set-up, Trip Advisor also allows travelers to list the best hotels, the best restaurants and the best nightlife in Taipei, which makes choosing the perfect places significantly easier.

Basics

Trip Advisor is an American company, but there are specialized sites all over the world these days as Trip Advisor is available for travelers in most countries. It was first established in the year 2000, and today it generates revenue of over $1,2 billion a year and employes close to 3,000 people. There are around 300 million unique visitors to the Trip Advisor website every year and the site has 60 million members and 170 million reviews. Most users access Trip Advisor through its main webpage and through social media accounts like Facebook, but it also has a mobile app which is available on smartphones and tablets.

Trip Advisor has grown into one of the biggest travel companies in the world over the last decade or so, and as is so often the case with growing, profitable companies, they have acquired a number of other businesses since then. The biggest of these include Holiday Watchdog and Holiday Lettings, both of which are based in the United Kingdom, along with US-based companies Travel Pod, Smarter Travelers and Booking Buddy.

Layout

There is a lot going on here, as Trip Advisor mixes a big community and social media connections with reviews on everything from hotels to attractions and restaurants. You can also use Trip Advisor to mark down all the countries you have been to and all of the things that you have seen, but you will need to connect via your FaceBook account to do this and your results will be seen by other friends who have connected their own accounts to Trip Advisor.

Honesty

Trip Advisor was created as a way of spreading honest reviews and opinions about hotels and attractions. For the most part, this is exactly what it does, but by its very nature, it is open for exploitation. It is not unheard of for smaller venues to pay for reviews in order to raise the prestige of their hotel or their attraction. This is why, if a listing only has a handful of reviews and all of them are 5-stars, you should be cautious. Of course, not everyone abuses the system like this, but the few that have done so have made things difficult for everyone else.

Another issues that has caused controversy on Trip Advisor since its creation is the fact that some unscrupulous companies — no doubt the same who generate fake reviews for their own listings — place bad reviews on the listings of their competitors. There is competition in all areas of business and most of it is healthy, but there are always going to be a few bad eggs.

However, due to the sheer size of Trip Advisor and the amount of honest people that use the site, the good far outnumbers the bad.

Booking

One of the things that puts many people off the Trip Advisor site, is the fact that when it comes to booking, they don’t handle anything themselves and always refer customers to other booking sites. Most of the time this happens in the form of pop-ups, and as there are many booking sites linked to Trip Advisor it is not unheard of for visitors to be hit with a barrage of pop-ups. This is annoying, but there are ways to control and if you’re looking for the cheapest deal on a particular hotel, then you might even welcome these pop-ups.

The beauty of Trip Advisor is that you can use it to see who has the cheapest prices on a given hotel, looking through everything from Hotels Combined and Booking.com, to Expedia and many more.

Summary

Overall, we like Trip Advisor. We tend to prefer sites like Hotels Combined when it comes to booking hotels, as it’s a little more streamlined, easier to navigate and it doesn’t force a multitude of pop-ups on you. You can also book through Hotels Combined, whilst you can’t do that through Trip Advisor.

Trip Advisor does have its uses though, and if you want to find a great place to eat, then look no further. We love the restaurant listings and for the same reasons we also love the attractions and nightlife listings. It’s often hard to pinpoint the best and most popular places to eat and have fun in a new city, which is why these listings are so great.