Watching couples walking hand in hand through the open-air lobby of the all-inclusiuve Riu Bachata in Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic, reinforces my belief in how easy writing hotel reviews can be.
Of course not all travel writers will agree with me. And there was a time, I reflect, as I sip on the pina colada I brought over from the bar (not the bar by the pool, but one of the others), when I didn’t feel that way either.
Traditionally, the problem with writing reviews — other than that after about 500 of them you begin to live in fear that your embarrassing depth of knowledge about things like the thread count of hotel sheets will emerge unbidden in the course of an otherwise normal conversation — is that they are so subjective, and so dependent upon conditions often unique to your individual stay (it is unlikely that someone else will find a live goat in their bathtub), that it is impossible to voice a critique a would-be guest can absolutely count on to reflect their own experience.
What are the areas of subjectivity hotel reviews are based upon? There are setting, facilities, and dining, all of which normally require a reviewer to see how those things might be related, however distantly, to photographs shown of them on the hotel website. There is service, usually measured by making an outrageous request, such as asking that a cheese platter be brought up to your room, by someone dressed as a Disney character, when you are not staying at a Disney hotel. And there is price, guests’ perceptions of it likely to vary significantly, depending on whether they can book a luxury oceanfront suite without much thought or expect things to be just so because they are, after all, paying $57 per person per night.
Bringing all these factors together in a meaningful way can be so demanding that many professional hotel reviewers routinely rely on a network of resources they hope will allow them to balance their personal observations with points of view other than their own. That is to say they crib from Tripadvisor.
I myself don’t rely on Tripadvisor reviews, largely because too many of them, particularly for hotels in the tropics, start with a complaint about cockroaches, a criticism that, having spent some of my more formative years in South Florida, predisposes me to look with disdain on anything else the reviewer might have to say.
What I now rely on instead, especially at a resort like the Riu Bachata, whose guests tend to be couples, often on their honeymoon or actually having their wedding at the resort, is how many of them are holding hands.
Unless it’s a parent dragging a five-year-old to a time-out location, people hold hands when they are happy. And resort guests are happy when, for them, the hotel has gotten the balance of setting, facilities, dining, service, and price just right.
So all I have to do is observe what percent of guests are holding hands, and assign the total a number on my recently created Happy Hands Index ™. I give the Riu Bachata, for instance, a 7 out of 10. It’s not the fanciest resort in the Caribbean, or even in Puerto Plata, but people generally seem to be having a good time. In fact, I would rank it even higher, except there appears to be some kind of police activity going on and I notice that one of the couples is not actually holding hands but is cuffed together at the wrists.
The Dominican Republic is one of those countries (the U.S. being another) where you don’t want to get too curious about police activity, so, work-day concluded, I am headed back to the beach, where I should be in plenty of time to finish watching two competing sets of wedding parties play volleyball.
(Doubles from $57 per person, all inclusive, not including local taxes, airport transport, spa services, casino losses, or consequences arising from discovery of concurrent visits by former spouses. Happy Hands Index: 7; www.riu.com )
