Surprised there is only one mention of Booking.com here. It is an indispensable tool for booking my vacations. The reviews are very useful and a lot more accurate than things like yelp. I have glanced at other websites, but nothing gives me the reassurance of the legitimacy of the reviews that booking.com does.

Agree - it really helps you identify which parts of the experience are problematic. If the location is 8.7 where everything else is 9.5+, you know you'll be walking a distance to get anywhere useful. If the location is 9.5 while cleanliness is 7.8, you can consider the trade-off to be in the thick of things.

So do low end hostel sites, funnily enough. Arguably they need it more to distinguish between the places that are popular because they're clean, good value and quiet and the places that are popular because they have a very good (and loud) bar and a vendor who's very good at persuading people to go on his tours