Travel tips

I was telling one of my friends today about this great website I use whenever I travel and he suggested I put a note about it here. So here it is...

The website is called TripAdvisor.com and it's a place where travelers can post reviews of hotels, locales and other things. Then the website rates the places based on the reviews. The reviews are often wide-ranging even for places that are ranked very high. But what I like best is that within a review you can often find nuggets that you wouldn't otherwise learn until you got to the hotel.

For example, we used this site extensively when researching where we would stay when we went to St. Lucia. Within the reviews, several commented about avoiding getting rooms in certain buildings in the complex (at the resort where we stayed) because some were located along the main road and were really loud. That was really helpful and we made use of it when we requested our room.

I'm using the site right now to find good beach places to go next January or February. Our only requirements are that it be on a beach, with warm weather (80+ degrees), that it has scuba diving, that it's all-inclusive and that it's not a terribly long flight. If you've got any ideas, send them my way!