It's amazing how many people book accommodation first and then come on here and ask about it Why not do that first, after all it's a bit late once it's booked.

A regular item in Complaints - booked the holiday and now read the reviews HELP!!!



fwh

????????? As already has been said, you can't compare the 2 sites, totally different users/reasons for using. If they were given identical power & same level of membership you say HT would win hands down, how? The levels of moderating & vetting couldn't be the same as it is now & the site would inevitably change with a membership base of millions.

Why are they different reasons for using.? Surely both sites are the general public seeking/exchanging advice.? I've been going DIY for the last couple of years, but I've still obtained and shared my knowledge of the area, which regardless of whether or not if I had gone into a 5*hotel via Thomson, I hope has been valuable to other people, and it's the same advice being given out in TA to the same type of questions posted in TA.

You cannot use size as an excuse for allowing fake reviews and of course if HT had a bigger membership base things would have to change, for a start we'd need more bandwidth and a hell of a lot more moderators, but that should not mean that the ethos of the site should change too because we are not a booking agent and it makes no difference to HT who books with whom.
Do you think if Thomson went to court to fight a case and used the excuse that because they sell millions of holidays that the Judge should or would accept that excuse.?

Why have a good old scrap & highlight faults in TA? It's irrelevant

No, it's not irrelevant, in fact it's very relevant when the general public are being duped in the interest of commercialism.
The foundation stone of HT was laid down on Truth and since its existence it has adhered to that ethos, and despite the pressure from outside forces, it has remained independent, where many others have not survived and have fallen into the clutches of Expedia.
Just because you're not British does that mean that you don't want the truth.? If you're an American doing a grand tour of Spain, the standards of hotels and size of bedrooms etc may be different to what they would be in America, but should people who have a vested interest in the area be allowed to dupe them.?
There are some good honest people posting in TA, it would be totally unfair to say otherwise, but TA need to throw out the bad apples and until they do, IMO it doesn't have much credibility on the world stage regarding the principles of exchanging honest opinions.
I'm saying no more about TA.

Sanji

Does anyone ever look at this.

Total posts 762036 | Total topics 66523 | Total members 56966

Not 100% accurate as there has been some deleting done over the years as part of the housekeeping. It does however - even with the one post wonders as I call them show how valuable HT is. Add in the number of people who visit the site as guests. Never joining but reading then it shows how much people value the site. Perhaps the mods may have some figures for the number of views for the hotels.

We might not be the biggest but HT is still a significant force. For many years I, and many many other members have been telling people we meet about HT. If only some of those guest viewers would take that next step. Join and post then it would be even better.

fwh

Can I bring the subject around to the media gallery? I don't know why but I'm not so keen on the set up of the 'new' media gallery. I think the old HT gallery was more user friendly and I posted a lot more pictures in there.

Now I definitely don't want to sing the virtues of TA B U T........ if I'm looking for photographs of a certain hotel, I can find them quickly and easily there because they are actually attached to the hotel reviews. For example, I'm thinking of booking hotel X. I find the reviews on TA and on the same page as the reviews a 'photo' box will appear and I'm able to click on it and look through a slide show of all the photos of the property that have been posted by various members.

It's a long and frustrating process looking for hotel photos on HT. After logging in to the media site, I'd have to scroll to the country, then the area and then look through numerous individual pictures until I happened to stumble on pictures of the accomodation I wanted to view. Impossible really, unless I'm missing some short cut.

Would there be a way of attaching hotel pics to their reviews?

Shirley if you type into the search engine at the top of holiday truths the name and place of your Hotel, it finds hotels (I assume from Google search) and images, not sure if you were aware of that.

Miss Pink wrote:

Shirley if you type into the search engine at the top of holiday truths the name and place of your Hotel, it finds hotels (I assume from Google search) and images, not sure if you were aware of that.

That's on the Media page is it Miss P ? not the HT main page.

Judith wrote:

Miss Pink wrote:

Shirley if you type into the search engine at the top of holiday truths the name and place of your Hotel, it finds hotels (I assume from Google search) and images, not sure if you were aware of that.

That's on the Media page is it Miss P ? not the HT main page.

Yes Judith, at the top left hand side

thanks for that Miss Pink I hadn't thought of putting the hotel name in the search box. However, it came up with *no matches* to a couple I've just tried but it did show the HT images underneath-they were all mixed in with pictures from other websites the search engine had found. Not a particular problem but it would be nice if the HT ones would come up all grouped together. If I wanted to see random photos, I'd just have googled images.

Hence my query about being able to upload pics to the reviews.

There was talk of it happening but nothing came of it

Can I bring the subject around to the media gallery? I don't know why but I'm not so keen on the set up of the 'new' media gallery. I think the old HT gallery was more user friendly and I posted a lot more pictures in there.

Now I definitely don't want to sing the virtues of TA B U T........ if I'm looking for photographs of a certain hotel, I can find them quickly and easily there because they are actually attached to the hotel reviews. For example, I'm thinking of booking hotel X. I find the reviews on TA and on the same page as the reviews a 'photo' box will appear and I'm able to click on it and look through a slide show of all the photos of the property that have been posted by various members.

It's a long and frustrating process looking for hotel photos on HT. After logging in to the media site, I'd have to scroll to the country, then the area and then look through numerous individual pictures until I happened to stumble on pictures of the accomodation I wanted to view. Impossible really, unless I'm missing some short cut.

Would there be a way of attaching hotel pics to their reviews?

Hi Shirley

It's a long and frustrating process looking for hotel photos on HT. After logging in to the media site, I'd have to scroll to the country, then the area and then look through numerous individual pictures until I happened to stumble on pictures of the accomodation I wanted to view. Impossible really, unless I'm missing some short cut.

I think in principle the new media gallery is no different to the old gallery where you had to find the country, EG: Spain, find the area EG: Costa del Sol and then in the sub section the resort, EG: Torremolinos, Benalmádena, Fuengirola. etc.

Would there be a way of attaching hotel pics to their reviews?

What purpose would that have.? Just asking, because one presumes that anybody booking a hotel would have searched out photos before booking and by attaching photos to the reviews, you might run the risk of photos being posted that really have nothing to do with the review.

If I have one criticism of the new gallery I think poor Alfie must be very lonely because it does seem to appear more detached from the main board, but then you have to look at the options Van has created, like hosting a variety of videos, and believe me uploading videos were a pain in the old gallery and they took up too much bandwidth, also, creating your own gallery to share with friends only and writing a blog.

I think we ask for too much at times, I like to ride my broomstick when most sane people are in bed, and Van is around at the most ungodly hours working in the background and doing his own programming, which will take a long time, now if we were a site like TA (oops sorry I said I wasn't going to mention them again, :lol:) they can afford to pay programmers £1,000's to do the job in a matter of days.

One thing that we can say about Van, and that is that his mind is always open to constructive suggestions to enhance the site.

Sanji

Hi Sanji

I do know what Shirely means (I think), when I booked my big holiday last year to Jamaica I did the research and looked at anything and everything about Mo'Bay and the Hotel and anything at all related to Jamaica. The photo's on tour sites are the standard ones taken by the tour ops - but on TA there are dozens of photos taken by the holiday makers of things that you would not normally see - if you were able to attach photo's to each review then that would be a visual display as well as written.

I think the old HT gallery was more user friendly and I posted a lot more pictures in there.

obviously everybody will have different experiences of this, depending on what they use the gallery for. Personally I (and a few others who've tried explaining on another thread) found it far easier to upload photos to the old gallery as we could load 5 at a time. We also used to be able to browse and upload the pics BEFORE adding a description. Now we can only upload one at a time and we hae to know exactly what pic we want to upload before starting the process as we have to describe it and put tags before uploading. Wheras adding 5 pics with descriptions would have taken me about 3 mins max in the old gallery. It would now take me at least 10 mins to do it.

I think in principle the new media gallery is no different to the old gallery where you had to find the country, EG: Spain, find the area EG: Costa del Sol and then in the sub section the resort, EG: Torremolinos, Benalmádena, Fuengirola. etc.

Which is why I think that accomodation photos are easier to find on TA.

Quote:
Would there be a way of attaching hotel pics to their reviews?

What purpose would that have.? Just asking, because one presumes that anybody booking a hotel would have searched out photos before booking

That's why I'd like to see photos attached to the reviews as it's a place I'd search for photos before booking.

To me it makes sense- I read reviews of where I'm thinking of booking and at the same time I can see the relevant photos.

I do know what Shirely means (I think), when I booked my big holiday last year to Jamaica I did the research and looked at anything and everything about Mo'Bay and the Hotel and anything at all related to Jamaica. The photo's on tour sites are the standard ones taken by the tour ops - but on TA there are dozens of photos taken by the holiday makers of things that you would not normally see - if you were able to attach photo's to each review then that would be a visual display as well as written.

I have been able to attach photos/videos to the reviews, not actually showing in the review, so maybe I'm at cross purposes here, I did a review of a hotel and posted a link at the bottom of the review to a video I had made of the hotel, which I had uploaded into the gallery, so by clicking on the link it took the reader straight to the video.
Yes I can see the point of showing photos taken by holiday makers, hence the reason why I make videos, but apart from having active links and keeping all the photos in one place, I don't see the benefits of using up bandwidth for photos that can be linked and displayed by the click of the mouse.
Just my opinion of course.

sanji

I have the feeling that I'm coming over as being objectionable to ideas just for the sake of it.
Not at all, but I think some of you have to be realistic regarding certain suggestions.
Firstly it's no use saying what TA do because we are not TA and never will be able to play with the same ball.
We do not have the financial resources to have a team of programmers and neither do we have the finances to pay for a colossal amount of bandwidth to do all the things that would enhance this site, which may include attaching photos to reviews.

We have to work within the restraints of the revenue generated by allowing a few advertisements on the site.

Sanji

Edit for typo error

We have to work within the restraints of the revenue generated by allowing a few advertisements on the site.

Yes that's a good point Sanji.

I know we are not TA, nor would I wish us to immitate TA but I was just wondering whether there would be a way of attaching photos to reviews, where we could see all the pics of a particular hotel at a click of a button. I was using TA's way of doing it as an example.

I'm not technically minded at all (know nothing about bandwidths etc) which is why I posted the query about the possibility.

Hi Shirley
No I'm not technically minded either, but the more stuff you add to a website, the more bandwidth you need and I presume have to pay for.

I know I had to be careful with the amount of stuff I added to my website because I only have a limited allowance, and things like videos can take up a lot of the allowance, so that's why I linked them to the media gallery in HT.
I dearly wish Van could win the lottery and we could have all the things we would like, but you never know what he's doing in the background and displaying photos in the reviews may well be a possiblity.

Sanji

you want my guess ?

well here it is anyway....

people used to be on desktop pc's... and there wasn't a lot of choice...
then they moved to laptops and more and more sites were appearing...
now lots of people access the tinterweb on their smart phones... and here by lies a problem.. on my phone it takes forever to open up HT (and other sites) typing all the passwords and such, waiting for each bit to load etc... I can get some sort of download to use HT but I'd have to buy it and to buy it I'd need to put my credit card details into the phone (and there is no way I'm doing that !!!)... so I don't use it when I'm out and about... When you have returned home you have already done a lot of your surfing and found out a lot of things you might have asked on HT...

or something along those lines..

My tuppenceworth: ever since the lighthearted thread(can't remember it's name) was removed the 'atmosphere hasn't been the same.
The general holiday enquiries thread is good but doesn't provide the same banter/cameraderie

AskCy wrote:

you want my guess ?

well here it is anyway....

people used to be on desktop pc's... and there wasn't a lot of choice...
then they moved to laptops and more and more sites were appearing...
now lots of people access the tinterweb on their smart phones... and here by lies a problem.. on my phone it takes forever to open up HT (and other sites) typing all the passwords and such, waiting for each bit to load etc... I can get some sort of download to use HT but I'd have to buy it and to buy it I'd need to put my credit card details into the phone (and there is no way I'm doing that !!!)... so I don't use it when I'm out and about... When you have returned home you have already done a lot of your surfing and found out a lot of things you might have asked on HT...

or something along those lines..

The site works well on my phone,

I use my phone for internet access a lot but still browse on the laptop.

And it still doesn't answer the fact that the hotel we will visit in 5 weeks gets lots of reviews a week but the last one on here is over a year ago, I think that's the crux of the thread