The best travel time in Tibet is usually from April to November. The most successful luxury travel advisors can tap into deep reservoirs of knowledge about current travel trends and desires, as well as intimate familiarity with experiences the best suppliers are featuring that go beyond a traveler’s initial dream.
TripAdvisor started out as a much-needed alternative source of information, but has unfortunately become a hulking leviathan giving a disproportionately large and powerful voice to masses of anonymous reviewers spreading unfiltered misinformation and contributing to cultural misunderstanding.
I’ve had tour clients recommended to me by their friends, who still double-checked with TripAdvisor before contacting me. My own family members have come to Paris with a list of restaurants collected from TripAdvisor rather than ask me — a travel writer living here since 1995 — for my recommendations (on the plus side, I don’t get any of the blame if they hate it).
TripAdvisor markets all of this as services” for businesses listed on their site, but we’re just really promoting the TripAdvisor brand”, as if they represent anything other than the anonymous and often unreliable mob at best, and a bunch of desperate or unscrupulous business owners committing fraud at worst.
I travel to Sandals in Jamaica a lot and always love the reviewers whining that they booked the lowest level room and then were put into the room they booked rather than being upgraded to a butler suite or bitching about things beyond the control of anyone, my favorite being a reviewer who did nothing but complain that the ocean water was too salty.” You really have to wade through the fakes and the complainers but I do like looking at TripAdvisor for reviews and seeing if there are consistent complaints running through recent reviews that would make me not want to book a hotel or go to the attraction.