What are "customer review ratings", and can they be trusted?

What are "customer review ratings", and can they be trusted?

Catharine Hamm (Travel Editor, LA Times) gives expert video advice on: How should I pick a hotel?; What are the most common types of rooms offered by hotels? and more...

Customer review ratings often show up on sites like TripAdvisor, and it's the public saying what it thinks of a particular hotel, but you have to be careful. The way we look at customer review ratings, we generally discount the very, very high end and the very low end, because you really don't know the people who are responding. So, throw out the highest, throw out the lowest, and look at the middle range of what people are saying. I had an experience in Paris where the TripAdvisor rating on this particular hotel was just awful. It talked about how mean the proprietor was, but I went there anyway and they were lovely. So, you really can't always trust customer review ratings because you don't know who's writing them.