Have you ever come to a “charming hotel with a view of the most cozy corner of Florence” only to discover that you actually booked a tiny, stuffy room facing a dirty yard? Has a “luxury, all-inclusive tour” for only $75 ever turned out to be a terrible trip for you, amidst a crowd of people very dissimilar to you, and where you’re served sandwiches with old cheese for breakfast, lunch, and dinner? We asked an advertising specialist to teach us how to correctly read travel ads and never again fall for the old bait and hook.
- Fear adjectives.
If you see the words “charming”, “romantic”, “luxurious”, “cozy”, and so on without any details in the ad, beware. Very often, these words are not used to emphasize value, but to hide the shortcomings of an offer. A truly luxurious hotel room is described as follows: “King size bed, Iranian handmade carpets, loggia with access to the bay, and a class A Jacuzzi”. When people really have something to boast about, they are proud to list the details, rather than brushing them aside with generic words.
- Read the reviews, not the description
If the site you’re using to choose a hotel, vacation apartment, rental car, or tour doesn’t have reviews, then run away! Also, the reviews should not be lacquered words with a pretty picture signed by “Danny from Idaho” or “Jennifer from Moscow”, but should actually be interactive. It’s easy to check – try to leave a review yourself: you don’t have to press the “Send” button, but the form should work. Does it work? If so, only read what people posted, and just ignore what the advertisers wrote.
- Cheap means suspicious
As an advertiser, I am well aware that very cheap offers can be perfectly sincere. For example, this could happen when an airline, tour operator, or a hotel wants to acquire new customers at any cost. However, more often than not, the price for a good product isn’t lowered “just because”. If an ad offers 4 nights in a hotel plus a flight for $200, try to imagine how the deal is arranged from the company’s side of things: the cost of such a tour should be, at most, $150 per person. Can you imagine how much the ticket and a night at a normal hotel cost? Even if the company gets an operator discount of 50% (this is rare), the deal still doesn’t add up. This means that you would get either a very bad room, a hotel in a very poor location, a charter on a ragged old plane, or all three. That’s not to say that “cheap” always means “bad”, but the details are very important.
- No answer – no deal
Even if the room, tour, or spa offer looks fine and reads authentically, don’t be too lazy to ask the offering company a few questions. What’s important isn’t so much what they’ll reply to you, but rather the willingness on their part to promptly get in touch with you, especially when talking about services like Airbnb. If a person does not respond or answers evasively at this stage, then the person probably can’t be relied on, and therefore their advertised offer shouldn’t be trusted.
- A photo as a guarantee
If the ad does not have a photo, then there’s something wrong with it. No matter how detailed the description of the hotel or tour, a lack of photography (or the use of beautiful photos with smiling faces from a stock photo service rather than actual photos) can mean one of two things: either the owners/company have something to hide, or they do not care about you even now and will care even less in the future. A picture is worth a thousand words.
The editorial office thanks marketer Ilya Sergeev for his help in compiling the material for this article.