After nearly 3,000 straight days on the road, I feel like I’ve got travel down to a science. Packing up my entire life takes mere minutes, and researching flights is now second nature.
But when it comes to booking accommodation, I’ve learned to follow a strict set of checks before pressing the purchase button.
Over the years, I’ve had one too many “Instagram vs. reality” moments. From a room covered in cat hair in Okinawa, Japan, that my partner and I still call “cat piss house,” to a windowless room in Taiwan, cross-referencing reviews and looking for personal traveler images has become my most important piece of travel advice.
I’m not the only traveler who’s been duped. On a girls trip to Vegas, travel journalist and content creator La Carmina booked a budget-friendly hotel room near the Strip that felt like a steal. It only had a few Google reviews, and official hotel photos showed the rooms looking clean and new.
“When our Vegas Uber driver realized that we were heading to this hotel, he uttered a premonition of doom: ‘Uh, are you really staying there? Are you sure?’” she told HuffPost.
“As soon as we walked in, we were welcomed by a dead cockroach on the bathroom floor. I squealed when I saw another perched on the shower curtain; my friend somehow launched it in the air, and it landed in the toilet as well,” she recounted. Since then, she doesn’t trust a hotel with only a few Google or Tripadvisor reviews.
In recent years, travelers have taken to TikTok and Instagram to share videos of being “catfished” by hotels. One viral example is from an oceanside town in Germany, where a couple booked a room with a view of sea-swept sand dunes only to realize that the view was just a computer-generated photo taped to the window.
Another viral video shows a flight attendant walking into her ninth-floor hotel room in Mexico, overlooking a historic cathedral. It quickly becomes obvious that the image has been printed onto the roll-up curtain, and her real view is just a white wall.
During a vacation in Thailand, Hannah Loughlin, a hotel public relations professional, was scammed after booking a boutique hotel in Bangkok.
“The lobby was finished, but the floors above were under construction,” she told HuffPost. “We went up the stairs, and all rooms except one were under a tarpaulin to stop the dust. The room I was led into was the same one in the photo, but everything in it was literally for show. The electricity wasn’t connected; the bed was a hard, solid platform, albeit with a nice duvet and pillows; and the wardrobes wouldn’t open. The TV was a demo, and the shower room was where the workers had been using, with their toothbrushes and items left out.”
She turned right around and quickly booked a well-known, branded hotel. Loughlin said, “in the future, I plan more meticulously and stay in hotels recommended to me, or with better research or in brands I can trust.”
Most of my travels are in Asia, so Agoda.com is my go-to site when booking a hotel. Once I’ve narrowed down a few potential hotels in a good location and with the right price point, I look at the images. Instead of focusing on the professional photos that could easily be AI-generated, I find real photos taken by other travelers. If a hotel doesn’t have any, I close that tab and move on to my next option.
Samantha Brown, Emmy award-winning travel host of PBS’s ”Places to Love,” told HuffPost she’ll “check out the hotel on YouTube to see if anyone did an on-camera review of the hotel and its amenities.”
“These reviews give you more of the reality and less fantasy that the advertising would lead you to believe,” Brown said. “They also show a person in the room, so you get more of a human scale than a photograph of the room.”
Then, come the reviews. “When I’m comparing two or more hotels, and they all have similar ratings, I’ll pay closer attention to the hotel with the highest number of reviews. Sometimes one hotel will have a 4.5 rating with 134 reviews while another has the same rating but with over 1,000 reviews,” Brown explained.
I personally read the lowest-rated reviews first to see what the hotel’s biggest issues are. Here, you find out whether the hotel is actually a scam or just has bad WiFi and an uncomfortable mattress.
After that come the most recent ratings, as many hotels improve or come under new management over the years.
But many hotels pay for fake reviews, so it’s crucial to cross-check reviews on other booking platforms, including Booking.com and Google Reviews. Again, start by looking at the biggest complaints travelers have first and go from there.
Once you’ve done this level of due diligence, you can feel confident that the hotel you’ve booked, whether it be for a week or a month, is as advertised.
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