Crowdsourced Travel Reviews - The Hotels Certainly Hate Them

Certainly, without a doubt, we all hate it when we have a bad travel experience - an airline that handles a flight delay incompetently, a hotel that is carelessly managed and staffed by untrained hands - it's all quite terrible for as long as we go through it. But what about the way we feel about it when we come back home and regale our friends and family with how incompetent people can be? It's an oddly entertaining thing, and most listeners are interested in your story right away when you have a bad travel experience to share. In fact, this weakness we all have for gossip about bad travel experiences could actually explain the blockbuster popularity of websites like TripAdvisor and FlightsfromHell that specialize in morbid travel reviews.

Have you read some of the hilarious travel reviews on TripAvisor that throw wide open the doors to the truth about what even some reputed hotels can be like around the world? The inventive phrases reviewers think of to describe how disgraceful the hotels are that they stayed in are often real genius. "Cradle of filth" is how one traveler describes her bed in her hotel room; another woman says on TripAdvisor that her bed made her think of her own grave (at a hotel in England). There is even an insurance company called TravelGuard that gives prizes to the travel reviews that will tell the worst story ever.

In an industry that profits from bandying bad travel reviews about, this summer season may turned out to be slim pickings. Flights aren't getting delayed as much as they used to for one thing. A flight that gets you there on time somehow doesn't lend itself to nasty reviews. When you tell someone about an overcrowded flight, trash in the seat pocket from the last trip, and rude stewardesses, it doesn't quite earn you that much of a reaction when the flight isn't delayed.

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