Simple rule for using TripAdvisor in any even vaguely touristy place: Ignore the top ~20 or so restaurants/hotels when sorted by rating. You can pretty much guarantee that at a minimum, they're soliciting reviews from a pool of satisfied customers, and a good chunk of them are just flat out buying reviews. This rule doesn't work as well for attractions, since the big ones tend to make their way to the top regardless, but the attraction list is pretty useful on its own if you dig down a ways. I've found lots of interesting small places that I'd have never otherwise found down in the sub-50th percentile rated attractions.<p>I do generally like the trick mentioned below of only looking at bad reviews, but I'm fairly relaxed about certain things. Bad neighborhood, overpriced food, poor valet service? Meh, don't care. Room smells of smoke? Not staying there. Most of my hotel research is based on filtering out unacceptable things, rather than optimizing the positive aspects.<p>For hotels, I have vaguely more trust in booking.com reviews, since in theory you have to stay at a hotel to leave a review there. (I do mention every time in these threads that the booking.com review scale is wack, and the median score was actually something like 8.1/10 when I scraped a lot of them, so take those 7.0 "Good" ratings with a grain of salt). In theory in the US Opentable ratings would work the same way for restaurants, but that's restricting the pool of restaurants to those that take reservations, and I don't use those ratings myself, so I'm not totally sure how accurate it is. Still probably beats Yelp, and definitely beats TripAdvisor.