I loooooove planning trips. It’s so much fun to look at hotels and neighborhoods and learn about a city I’ve never visited.

I’m addicted to the site Trip Advisor; it’s super-easy to navigate and full of helpful information. Most listings have quite a few reviews, and I love to read the really bad ones written by people that clearly had unrealistic expectations. My favorites are the ones riddled with misspellings, like “hear” instead of “here,” or full of grammatical errors, or that are one long sentence.

I also really enjoy reviews that gripe about the size of the TV (I tend not to watch a lot of TV on vacation) or that are upset about something outside of the hotel’s control (like the weather). Sometimes I wish that the people who claim that a hotel is “filthy” would post photos of their own houses, just so we could get an idea of their frame of reference for cleanliness. 

My favorites, though, are the negative reviews to which a staff member of the hotel has responded. Sometimes the response is friendly and apologetic, and attempts to explain the situation and offers to respond offsite with the reviewer; other times (i LOOOVE these) the manager or staff member is kind of snippy back and suggests that the guest wouldn’t have been happy anywhere, or mentions that the guest was offered a different room and refused it, or that the guest chose to ignore the hotel’s guest information or signage. 

Every hotel reservation is a crapshoot; you never know what it’s going to REALLY be like until you get there. It’s part of the fun!