Tripadvisor: Plan & Book Trips

The night before you book

You have a handful of hotels open in a handful of tabs and no honest way to choose between them. That is the moment Tripadvisor earns its place, because whatever town you are staring at, somebody has already stayed there and written about it at length. Search hotels, restaurants and things to do, then read enough of the reviews to form your own view instead of trusting one loud opinion.

Reviews, photos and the forums

The booking layer pulls pricing from several sources, so the comparison happens in one place rather than across a row of tabs. Filters cut a long list down by the things that actually decide a booking. Saved trips and maps hold up well enough offline to be worth having abroad, and the rewards programme returns real money to anyone who books hotels regularly rather than occasionally. The two underrated parts are the traveller photographs, which show a room as it is rather than as it was styled for the brochure, and the destination forums, where a specific question about a specific place tends to get a specific and often expert answer back.

Where the selling gets in the way

Sponsored entries sit close enough to the ordinary results that some people have stopped trusting the order they are reading, and for a service whose whole value is trust, that is a slow poison. Ask it for the best restaurant near your hotel and you cannot always tell which of the answers was bought and which was earned, so you end up cross-checking somewhere else, which defeats the point of asking. The app is also trying to be a review site, a booking platform, a trip planner and a rewards scheme at once, and it does none of the four as cleanly as something built to do only one. Promotional messages need turning down early or they become their own small chore. As research it remains the strongest thing available, and on the trip itself it comes second to a focused app.