It's often hard to know how to go about choosing a hotel for your holiday. The website and glossy brochures will portray the hotel as a fabulous location full of luxury and glamour, but what is it like really? When so much is at stake, both financially and also as far as your valuable holiday time is concerned, you want to make sure you are making the right choice, and the service, facilities, noise and general state of the hotel is up to a good standard. What is the food like? Is it good value for money? Are the staff friendly and helpful? These are things which are of great importance, but cannot be demonstrated in any way at all through a website or brochure.

The most reliable way of knowing which hotels are worth staying in is through a personal recommendation, and if a family member or friend has stayed somewhere and recommended it, this can help put your mind at rest, and help you make a choice. However, the chances that someone you happen to know has recently stayed at the same location you are planning to visit is unlikely, and this leaves you in a difficult situation.

There are a number of excellent travel guides available in bookshops and at tourist information centers, and although these are almost always written quite independently and so the descriptions and verdicts of the hotel are written by people who are paid to inspect, or even stay at, the particular hotel, these reviews can often be a year out of date. These guides are usually annual editions, and the staff turnover, facilities and standards can change much more quickly than that, and so this doesn't give you the best advice. In addition to which, the people who write these books have a very wide range of experience of hotels, and their standards and expectations might be very different from the average family holidaymaker's.

Fortunately the internet has provided an alternative which works extremely successfully, although still to this day a relatively disjointed one. There are a number of travel and holiday websites which offer a review service, not run by the people who own the site, but by real genuine holiday makers such as yourself. These reviews are written by people who have recently stayed in a hotel, and have then very shortly afterwards written their own review about their experience. These are very much more up to date, often published within a week of the reviewer having stayed at the hotel, and will be written by non professional writers who are simply, like yourself, looking for a pleasant holiday.

Often these reviews will be categorized into types of traveler - either business people, individual travelers, family holiday makers, couples and so on, so that you can more easily identify with the type of expectations that the reviewer had.

One way in which you can help to improve this system for everybody is to add reviews yourself. Whenever you stay at a hotel or any other kind of accommodation, try to leave a review as soon as possible. There are so many websites to choose from, but if you booked it through an agent's site they may well have the facility for you to add a review on their own site. By adding your honest review, you will be helping future holiday makers to make more informed decisions, and in return, you may well benefit yourself by reading reviews left by others.