Trip Advisor is confusing me...

How seriously do you take the reviews you read on Tripadvisor. My mom has booked me a hotel in Fort Lauderdale with about 115 reviews, 40 are 5*, 35 are 4* and the rest are all going down.

Some people say, oh its so clean, others say its not so clean...

I am super confused!

Do I take these with a grain of salt?

I always do.  I use it, but I always elminate the worst and the best to get a rounded idea.

How seriously do you take the reviews you read on Tripadvisor. My mom has booked me a hotel in Fort Lauderdale with about 115 reviews, 40 are 5*, 35 are 4* and the rest are all going down.

Some people say, oh its so clean, others say its not so clean...

I am super confused!

Do I take these with a grain of salt?

Definitely take with a grain of salt.  It's not possible to know from the reviews how picky someone is, what their role in the quality of their experience was, etc.  You might have people with very low cleanliness standards saying it's clean and then OCD/compulsively clean neatnick types saying it's not so clean, you can't tell anything about the source of the information from the reviews alone.

For example, my husband and I stayed in a fantastic place in Tunisia that had received mostly bad reviews on tripadvisor, with the odd "this place is perfect/5 stars" review sprinkled in.  After we had a fantastic stay there, I added my review to tripadvisor to bolster up the "this place is great, I don't understand why people are dissing it" side and I allowed other people to contact me, and so far one person has done so to ask for more information, which I happily provided.

You might check whether any of the reviewers are contactable for more info as well.

And as you said, your mom has already booked the hotel, so maybe go with an open mind and don't worry about the reviews that are less favourable - just have a good time!

Do you mind saying which hotel?

I have been reviewing on TA for a couple of years now.

Whenever I read reviews for hotels in Europe, I find a portion of negative reviews are from North Americans who are unimpressed at the size of their rooms more than anything else. So in my mind, that isn't a legitimate gripe unless you were told ahead of time your room would be the same dimensions as an Olympic sized swimming pool.

A few years ago I reviewed a place we stayed in York on TA. We drove 5 hours up North to visit the city, and the woman of the couple we went with booked us at a local B&B and it was a disaster. We didn't sleep well, and decided to leg it a day earlier than planned. York was wonderful, but we were exhausted after the long drive and night of unrest.

After about 6 months of being on TA, my review, along with the mouldy photo pics were removed without explanation. The review wasn't overly dramatized, just contained basic facts of the filth we encountered.

So overall the quality of the negative reviews is something I pay attention to. What constitutes a negative review for you may not meet the same criteria for somewhere else.

But the reviews are mega fun the write! 

You may also want to pay attention to the dates of the reviews--sometimes a hotel will come under new management or will be under construction for a period of time. If all the bad reviews are clustered in one period, that might explain something.   

Trip Advisor has a notorious reputation in the travel industry as being unreliable.  Bad reviews disappear or are buried amongst dozens of glowing ones so as to confuse potential guests.  The site is run by Expedia so it's in their best interest to hype places they have deals with.  Buyer beware...

I work on the theory that if it's about 50% positive then it's probably ok. Also look at what people actually complain about - I saw one for a hotel I was booking in Dublin that gave it a very negative review but the main complaint seemed to be that nowhere was open in Dublin on a Sunday morning! What on earth has that got to do with the hotel - serves you right for visiting a very Catholic country! 
Another complained about a very load wedding party - again not something that will happen all the time.

I always read negative reviews. Some are easy to disregard because they are the kind that hit a teeny little snag on check-in and that causes them to look for the tiniest things to get upset about for the rest of the trip.

But some of them are valuable: a negative review of one of the hotels we were recently considering tipped me off to some fees that the hotel didn't disclose. Another negative review mentioned how poor the internet was. Details that might not mean much to some guests but are important to me.

One thing I would say, after staying at the worst hotel ever in NYC once - Manhattan Broadway (check out the reviews on TA, it really is that bad), is to not book a hotel on the internet unless they have their own website. That doesn't mean you should necessarily book via their site but at least check it before booking on hotel.com etc, because if it's a 3rd party website there is no guarantee that the pictures are genuine, at least with their website you would have some recourse.

I always use TripAdvisor.  I go straight to the negative comments and look for recent postings with specific, non-opinion facts like:

"Hotel under construction and was very loud"
"Hotel nice but surrounded by a water sewage plant"
"Swimming pool closed until April 15th"

I tend to ignore comments where the poster wants to tell a negative story and begins adding every minor thing (e.g. "and there wasn't a spare role of toilet paper")