Soon I’ll Be on Technorati!
Wednesday, March 10th, 2010Getting into this blogosphere and am supposed to add this claim code to my blog – so, here it is! Y2JH9ZHGTH28
Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category
Is it worthwhile to use TripAdvisor?
Monday, February 15th, 2010TripAdvisor® is a website that “provides recommendations for hotels, resorts, inns, vacations, travel packages, vacation packages, travel guides and lots more” worldwide. They use the opinions and experiences of travelers to calculate ratings. Depending on who is writing the review, and what their motives are, sometimes the ratings can be erroneous and provide inaccurate results (either for better or worse).
Susan Breslow Sardone is the Honeymoon and Romantic Travel Guide for About.com and she shares some useful information on how to use TripAdvisor.
The Bottom Line
Trip Advisor is a travel opinion aggregator. Recently some hotels — especially those with less-than-glowing reviews — have tried inducing guests with discounts, free nights, gifts, and other bribes to post positive reviews that counteract negative statements. Some hotels also encourage staff members to post bogus positive reviews. While Trip Advisor aims to monitor and remove fakes, there’s no way the service can totally eliminate them.
Pros
- Trip Advisor is a unique, timely, populist travel resource
- Trip Advisor enables a variety of opinions to be voiced
- Trip Advisor’s Quick Check is a well-integrated search engine for online booking
Cons
- Widely diverse opinions (“Loved it!”…”Hated it!”) make it hard to objectively evaluate a place
- Dissatisfied guests use Trip Advisor as a venue to broadcast bad experiences
- Trip Advisor has many poorly written trip reviews
- Bogus positive reviews posted along with honest ones can confuse users
Description
- Some 490,000 hotels and attractions and 22,000 cities are in the Trip Advisor database.
- Trip Advisor’s Hotel Popularity Index provides a ranking of the top hotels in a city.
- Trip Advisor also links to travel guidebooks and Web articles.
- Got a question? Nearly 2/3 of Trip Advisor forum posts get an answer within 24 hours.
- Candid photos by Trip Advisor members provide fresh perspectives.
- Free Trip Advisor emails include Trip Watch, a personalized newsletter, and Weekend Getaway Guide.
- Smart Deals on Trip Advisor indicate highly rated hotels with good prices.
Guide Review – Trip Advisor
Trip Advisor features some 25 million reviews, including both rants and raves about destinations, hotels, attractions, and restaurants.
If you’re like most travelers, when planning a trip you appreciate hearing or reading others’ opinions before you choose a place. Yet a surfeit of (often conflicting) voices can create cacophony and confusion. I recently received an email that said:
- I am so happy I came across your info on About.com. I am trying to plan a destination wedding, but get so discouraged after reading negative reviews on Trip Advisor about every place I look in to. (Except for Four Seasons and the Ritz, which are too expensive for me).
Here’s my advice to get the most from Trip Advisor:
- Take what you read on Trip Advisor with a grain of salt. If you see a scathing one-star review but no other writers complain about the same problem(s), it’s safe to write it off as an isolated incident.
- However, if you encounter the same complaint about a hotel repeatedly on Trip Advisor (e.g. “terrible service,” “dirty bathroom”), I’d trust it.
- Conversely, a glowing, this-place-couldn’t-be-better report on Trip Advisor — especially when it’s surrounded by others’ complaints — could have been written by a ringer.
- Use Trip Advisor as one — but not your only — resource for travel information. You can get a balanced picture by speaking with trusted friends and acquaintances, talking to a travel agent, and visiting other travel sites in addition to a property’s own Web site.
Original Source: Should You Trust Trip Advisor at About.com
Tourterelle – New Haven’s Newest Restaurant and Inn
Sunday, October 18th, 2009Tourterelle is a newly owned restaurant and inn in New Haven, VT, just 8 miles north of Middlebury and 35 miles south of Burlington. The inn has three tastefully decorated rooms (a stay includes a gourmet breakfast) and the restaurant, part of the Vermont Fresh Network, has been earning rave reviews. Here is Christine’s review:
Dinner at Tourterelle is sheer delight. The new owners, Christine and William Snell, who have come to New Haven, Vermont by way of Brittany and Maplewood, New Jersey, have done wonders to update and renew the venue on Route 7 in New Haven, formerly Roland’s Place. The bar is lightly romantic and lively – an intimate and sophisticated new place to meet up with friends before dinner, and the dining rooms feel country fresh, with a stove and a cozy new fireplace. Last Saturday evening at 7:00 the softly lit rooms were filled with both familiar and new faces and voices, creating a lovely, not-too-noisy atmosphere humming with gustatory satisfaction.
Our food was wonderful all around – earthy, herbal, homemade bread twists with delicately dressed salads, perfectly cooked rare tuna, and a sturdy bouillabaisse with mussels adorned with a sinful dollop of sublime saffron aioli. We finished up with a simple and satisfying creamy custard. The only disappointment of the evening was a small, and primarily French wine list, which I feel will grow as their newly made friends and fans make requests for additions! Having read elsewhere about William’s lobster mashed potatoes and his duck liver with raisin-brioche bread pudding, I cannot wait to go back to see if they appear on the menu soon!
Click here to visit their site for hours and contact information.
Middlebury, Vermont Real Estate Data
Friday, September 25th, 2009So how does the Middlebury VT real estate market look these days? Currently Middlebury has a average listing price for homes for sale of $284,082. The ADDISON county average currently is $389,330.
The current number of properties on the market in Middlebury is 50. The Middlebury median listing price is $243,167.
For ADDISON county real estate the total listings are 339 and a median listing price of $273,733. This compares to Vermont real estate data, which this week shows a total number of listing properties as 7,090 with a median listing price of $258,050. To see a breakdown of Middlebury real estate listings by bedroom, scroll down.
Middlebury Real Estate Listings by Bedroom (updated weekly)
| Number of Bedrooms | Properties / Homes for Sale | Average Listing Price | Median Listing Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 12 | $211,558 | $187,500 |
| 2 | 27 | $301,505 | $249,000 |
| 3 | 5 | $323,260 | $279,900 |
| 4 | 4 | $381,604 | $280,958 |
| 5 | 3 | $401,208 | $292,083 |
ADDISON county homes for sale by bedroom (updated weekly)
| Number of Bedrooms | Properties / Homes for Sale | Average Listing Price | Median Listing Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 12 | $152,903 | $163,670 |
| 2 | 50 | $218,872 | $187,152 |
| 3 | 164 | $352,888 | $254,500 |
| 4 | 73 | $459,984 | $329,150 |
| 5 | 19 | $913,290 | $379,000 |
| 6 | 6 | $971,333 | $1,090,000 |
| 7 | 2 | $444,250 | $444,250 |
| 8 | 1 | $1,300,000 | $1,300,000 |
| 9 | 1 | $1,300,000 | $1,300,000 |
Vermont real estate homes for sale by bedroom (updated weekly)
| Number of Bedrooms | Properties / Homes for Sale | Average Listing Price | Median Listing Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 295 | $178,262 | $125,000 |
| 2 | 1,236 | $217,180 | $186,000 |
| 3 | 3,096 | $332,508 | $259,900 |
| 4 | 1,569 | $519,697 | $346,500 |
| 5 | 419 | $802,557 | $448,917 |
| 6 | 131 | $931,261 | $597,333 |
| 1 | 39 | $938,852 | $681,250 |
| 8 | 20 | $903,818 | $549,000 |
| 9 | 8 | $2,508,690 | $697,450 |
| 10 | 1 | $5,965,000 | $5,965,000 |
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