Google's hotel reviews

[jp10558]

I was just looking for a hotel potentially in Savannah and the historic district, and then as a backup in Jacksonville. I usually check Hilton properties because I have an Aspire card and usually have liked their properties. All the hotels in the Historic district had enough recent bad reviews - with details (though somewhat similar ones) that I was kind of scared of booking anywere, Hilton or otherwise. I ended up just booking a $105 Holiday Inn that had pretty good reviews off of I-95 outside Jacksonville.

Now, I can understand a couple hotels being bad. I even understand most historic hotels in a specific part of a city have noise complaints. But all of them had a noticeable amount in the first 20 reviews mentioning horrible smells, mold, poor cleaning, and run down rooms. I'm starting to wonder if either all hotels in Savannah and almost all in Jacksonville are either trash now - in similar ways - or if there's some negative PR campaign against them in the Google reviews. There were semi common - stains on bedding, clumps of hair in the shower drain and almost every bad review mentioned mold.

Have you found that google reviews of hotels are now often scary? I don't mean the star ratings, I mean well more than one "stay anywhere else but here" either explicitly or strongly implied in probably 40% of the recent reviews of hotels on Google...

 

[easyrider]

We reserved at a hotel that had good reviews in San Simone CA . When we arrived there were some crudy old vans with occupants hanging out in front of our room. We went into our room and it looked like the bed had been used so we pulled the sheets back to find someones fake eyelash. We left and went across the road to a different hotel that had many bad reviews along with good reviews but our room was pretty decent so we stayed.

It's kind of a crap shoot with non-branded hotels, imo. I usually look at Trip Advisor for reviews.

Bill

 

[ljmiii]

I tend to ignore Google hotel reviews as the signal to noise ratio is extremely low. And there are many other websites with more informative hotel reviews (e.g. TripAdvisor) written by frequent travelers.

 

[Tia]

I looked at car rental reviews for Avis STT where I put in a 1* review a couple years back, there are many more poor ratings after mine. I know it's not hotel but seem accurate for this compared to our experience.