Travel Resources: TripAdvisor

Trip Advisor is a giant in the travel world. It has reviews, rankings, forums, and lots of other resources to help you decide where to go, and what to do once you're there. I like to use Trip Advisor to vet trip locations: once I have an idea where we might go, I look at pictures of local attractions to see how interesting they look, and I'll check hotel reviews to decide where to stay.

A couple of tips:

    * Rather that use the someone tricky navigation to find your location, put "XX tripadvisor" into your browser as a search. It'll pull up the main page for that location much faster. This also works if you are looking for reviews of a specific hotel.
    * Don't get stuck just looking at hotels- check the vacation rentals and special accomodations too.

    * On that note, don't forget to look at restaurants and attractions in the area, where the reviews can be really helpful to determine if an attraction is worth the time, and what food options might be worth exploring. We really enjoyed the Denver Botanic Gardens, and Playa Flamenco.
    * Read the reviews and look at pictures: we often double check deals available through Groupon or Livingsocial against reviews on Trip Advisor. It may actually be too good to be true- I don't want to risk bedbugs, food poisoning, and really awful service. Better to get a heads up, so that we can decide where you can be flexible and where you're not willing to possibly compromise.

    * Search each location multiple times, using different filters, including the navigation bar (even if it is slow). We never would have found Casa Flamboyant in Puerto Rico if we hadn't done this, and it was one of the highlights of our trip.