I have booked a lot of hotels on the strength of a high average score and been disappointed, and booked a few on a mediocre one and been delighted. The average is close to useless and the reviews underneath it are not.
Here is how I read them now.
Read the three-star reviews first
The single most useful habit. Five-star reviews are frequently written in the glow of a good holiday and say nothing specific. One-star reviews are frequently about one bad interaction and tell you about the reviewer.
The middling reviews are written by people who thought about it. They tend to say what was good and what was not, in proportion, and they are where the specific detail lives.
If a property has no middling reviews at all, that is worth noticing on its own.
Look for repeated specifics
One person mentioning thin walls is a person who had a noisy neighbour. Six people mentioning thin walls over eighteen months is a building with thin walls.
The things worth searching the reviews for, because they recur and because they matter: noise, water pressure and hot water, air conditioning, the bed, the walk from the nearest transport, and whether the pictures match.
Most review platforms let you search within reviews. Typing "noise" and reading what comes back takes two minutes and has saved me repeatedly.
Sort by recent, always
Properties change hands, change management and change standard. A high average built over five years can conceal a sharp decline in the last six months.
I read the last twenty reviews regardless of the overall score, and if there is a visible break in tone — a run of good ones followed by a run of complaints — that is a management change and the recent ones are the accurate ones.
The reverse happens too and is worth catching. A property with a poor average that has been renovated will have a run of recent positive reviews dragged down by an old average.
What the photographs tell you
Not the official ones. The ones guests upload.
Official photographs are taken with wide lenses in good light with everything arranged. They are accurate and they are not representative.
Guest photographs show the room as it is, at the size it is, with the view it has. The difference between the two is the single best predictor of whether you will be disappointed.
Particularly worth looking for: the actual size of the room, whether the bathroom has a window, what is directly outside, and what the corridor and lift look like, which tells you about the building's maintenance more reliably than the room does.
Location claims are the most common deception
Not lies exactly, but consistent optimism.
"Ten minutes from the centre" is measured by somebody walking fast, not stopping, in the right direction, from the closest edge of what could be called the centre.
What I do instead is find the property on a map and measure the actual walk to two or three places I know I will go. This takes three minutes and is more informative than any amount of description.
Also worth checking on a map: what the building is next to. A hotel opposite a nightclub, beside a main road, or above a bar is usually visible from above and never mentioned.
The categories that are systematically inflated
Some scores across a whole platform seem to run high regardless of the property.
Staff and cleanliness are almost always rated highly, which means a merely average score in either is a warning rather than a neutral result.
Value is rated relative to what people paid, which varies enormously between guests, and is therefore close to meaningless as a comparison.
The scores that discriminate usefully are comfort and facilities, where the range across properties is wider.
Reviews written by people like you
Most platforms tag reviews by traveller type. Filtering to the type that matches your trip changes the picture considerably.
A property that families love may be exactly what a couple wanting quiet does not want, and both will be reflected in the average without either being wrong.
Business travellers care about different things and their reviews are frequently the most factually precise, because they are assessing a workplace rather than a holiday.
What I would ignore
Complaints about breakfast, unless several people say it is not included when it was advertised as included.
Complaints about price, which reflect what someone paid rather than the property.
Anything about weather.
And single dramatic reviews with no corroboration, in either direction, which are the least informative and the most compelling to read.
Reviews on the property's own site
Worth treating separately. Some booking platforms only accept reviews from people who actually stayed through them, which is a meaningful check. Others accept anything.
Reviews collected by the property itself, displayed on its own website, have no such verification and should be read as marketing.
The practical approach is to check two independent platforms rather than one. Where the picture is consistent, it is probably accurate. Where one platform shows a much better score than another, the difference is usually in who is allowed to post.
Writing your own
Since this depends on people bothering. The reviews that helped me most were specific and unemotional — what the room was like, how long the walk was, what the noise situation was, what I would have wanted to know.
That takes five minutes and it is the only thing anybody gets back from a system that otherwise runs on other people's effort.