4 years ago
Fantastic road
Fantastic road
Good morning, Ramsay_bocuse, and welcome to the TripAdvisor forums! Before I respond to your posting, I want to point out that I don't work for TripAdvisor. As with all Destination Experts, I'm a TA member like you who volunteers to help answer fellow members' questions.
Currently, TA requires accommodation reviews to be 200 characters, while restaurant and attraction reviews must be a minimum of 100 characters.
In your posting, you seem to be confusing words with characters, so I'll say that again: an accommodation review must consist of a minimum of 200 letters, numbers, punctuation marks, and space characters. It does not need to be 200 words long, which would be roughly five times as long as 200 characters.
The minimum length requirement was increased from 50 characters to the current lengths because TA members were complaining about very short reviews that contained little or no useful information. The idea is that forcing the reviewers to write more increases the chances that they will include something that is helpful.
I think that there is a lot that can be added to reviews to fulfill the requirements without adding meaningless words. If you're having problems meeting the minimum length, nobody wants you to become pointlessly verbose. Your fellow TA members want information. Answering the question "why?" Is a great way to make your reviews longer and also more helpful.
For example, if you visited three art museums with a focus on a particular painter, you are able to compare the three. Was one better than the other? Why? Did it have more helpful staff, better lighting, better explanations, more space to view the paintings, or was it something else?
If you felt a snack at a particular restaurant was memorable, explain why. Was the food fantastic? Was there a wonderful view? Were the staff unusually friendly or helpful? Was the restaurant building unique? What made that snack memorable to you?
Please don't be afraid of stating the obvious. What's obvious to you may not be obvious to others. It's okay to pretend that you're the first person to ever stay in that hotel, dine in that restaurant, visit that museum. What did you eat? What kind of room did you stay in? How much did you pay? (Please don't just say "expensive" or "cheap" because what you think is "cheap" may be expensive to someone else, or the other way around). Was it easy to get there? Did staff do anything memorable, either in a positive or a negative way? How would you describe the location?
Nobody wants meaningless words, but more information is always appropriate.
