Guest Author - Jill Browne

Travel planning, especially when it involves a new destination, usually involves a leap of faith.

You read travel guides, look at websites, and often find your searches turn up the same hotels - the ones with the biggest advertising budgets. They aren't always the most suitable for you.

Buying plane tickets and renting cars isn't usually the hard part of making travel arrangements. It's the accommodation that puts you into the realm of the speculative. Will you like the neighbourhood, the room, the price?

On my own most recent visit to London, England, I decided to stay in a new place, more central than my regular places.

I was soon overwhelmed by the many choices and the complicated packages - theatre and hotel on a Saturday night, was that a better deal than breakfast and accommodation without the theatre ticket, which neighbourhood would be safer to come back to at night, how far to the tube station, and so on.

I've booked lots of travel online and perhaps I'm lucky, but I have always had good results. Travelocity.com in particular has worked very well for vehicle rentals. However, this time I thought I'd try something new.

The TripAdvisor.com website is not particularly new to the world, but this was my first time using it. The website includes reviews, booking links for transportation and accommodations, and active discussion forums for many destinations. There are user's own journals and pictures, and generally lots of information.

What I like about TripAdvisor is that anyone can post a review of a place and rate it. After a while, the extreme ratings tend to cancel each other out, and the comments start to form a fairly complete picture of a place.

I looked up a local hotel in my own city as a way of checking how close to the truth, or at least how close to my preferences, TripAdvisor.com would come. In that case, there were several glowing reviews and one seriously negative comment, which, knowing the hotel, I found hard to believe. I called the hotel and they were extremely reasonable in responding to my question about the comment. TripAdvisor does have a feature allowing management to post a response to comments.

What it comes down to, in my opinion, is that you need to be able to determine whether the negative comments are coming from people pickier than you are, and conversely, whether the positive ones are from people whose standards are lower than your own. That is hard to do.

Sometimes you can look at several comments from the same user, to get a feel for their tastes. Or, you can communicate directly with the hotel and see whether they have dealt with whatever it was attracted a negative comment.

TripAdvisor provides a diversity of opinions. On top of those, I look at the tourist board's rating and see if I can find a review of the place in any of my guidebooks.

(I actually like finding places that aren't in the guidebooks, as they're less likely to be full or crowded.)

One warning I've heard about some of the websites which provide user comments are that the comments might not be genuine. They may be coming from what the old-time carneys would call shills - people paid to make an establishment look good. It is very easy to sign up for TripAdvisor.com, so the potential for abuse does exist.

One safeguard against this is to read many users' comments. Another is to ask the Local Experts on TripAdvisor.com if you have a concern about the validity of a comment, or you want their input. By using Local Experts (TripAdvisor's name), TripAdvisor keeps a measure of order in its forums.

Bottom Line: I have used a number of travel planning websites. TripAdvisor.com is easy to use and helped me find a very suitable London hotel which I otherwise would not have known about.

I would recommend the forums on TripAdvisor.com as a good place to ask questions of people who both live in and who visit your intended destination.

There are other good websites out there. I rarely rely on just one if I'm going to a brand new place. TripAdvisor.com is a good addition to my personal travel planning tool kit.