Thanks to the Internet and its spawns like Facebook and Twitter, everybody’s a critic. But not everybody is a good critic. Take hotel ratings. Like many other travelers, I have devised my own strange system for choosing a hotel, once I have settled on the location and price range. It encompasses word of mouth, hopeful guessing through past experiences with a given brand and wild speculation based on a haphazard sampling of the copious Internet reviews at various Web sites.

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