What's the best site for getting hotel reviews? (I have been on a few review sites, but to be honest sometimes it seems like half the reviews are written by hotel employees. I wonder if some sites like Trip Advisor or similar sites have a way of making sure that the reviews are real...)

TripAdvisor. They have their faults and failings, but love them or hate them, they have a natural monopoly.

Likewise, Google Plus may very well be a better personal social media platform, but they're never going to get everyone to migrate off Facebook because everyone else that everyone knows is on Facebook. So are all of their accumulated posts, status updates and cat pictures for the past ten years, which won't all be easily moved over to Google Plus.

So even if it were possible to build and launch a better travel review site, we'd still be stuck with TripAdvisor. The accumulated reviews for every hotel in the world, based on TripAdvisor's status for quite a few years now as the hotel review website, where one automatically goes to check a hotel, or read a review, is worth something and is indeed a valuable database. 

Every time I want to check out a hotel that I see listed for sale by a hotel broker, for example, TripAdvisor is the very next place I look. The broker will tell me things to make the hotel look good and worth a higher offer. The management will tell me things to make themselves appear to be worth keeping and left to do things they've always done them. A client-investor contemplating signing us to a management contract will tell us the things that support his own dream and vision, whether or not either is realistic in the future or grounded in past or present reality. But reading several pages of TripAdvisor reviews and taking them together will give me a pretty good idea what I'm really going to find when I get there, even if I've never visited that city before . . .

Why is paid internet access in hotels so shoddy?

Free internet access in a hotel is often shoddy.  Internet access is nearly always outsourced, and in many hotels, outsourced as on the cheap as possible.

And it's often outsourced to someone whose ability and enthusiasm for marketing exceeds their ability and enthusiasm for delivering a decent product that works, providing adequate bandwidth to keep up with demand, etc. 



For example, Ethostream, Choice Hotels' provider for internet, is a disease. Bandwidth is kind of thin (you get what you pay for), and every time you log in, you get that 'terms of service' screen which, once you approve the TOS, only gives you 24 hours of use before it cuts you off unexpectedly, and you have to go approve the TOS again (often having to close your browser and reopen it in the process). The TOS screen redirects you to the hotel's webpage - and provides its own address bar (like anyone's going to use that rather than the one on their own browser): apparently, this provider has a captive audience and plans to milk it for all it's worth, to the extent that it can. There's also a countdown clock on that address bar telling you how much time you have left, but most people are not going to use that address bar or even leave that screen open. And at least three or four times a week in some hotels, the switchboard lights up like a Christmas tree, with unhappy guests complaining that there's no internet, and the clerk usually has to leave the desk on autopilot (often at an inopportune time) and go reset the router.

What's the best way to show my appreciation for a hotel desk clerk that routinely upgrades me to a suite, free of charge? (I stay at a specific hotel regularly and the desk has the option to upgrade my room. They do it almost every time at no charge. I don't think it's a corporate policy to upgrade regulars; the clerks pick and choose the upgrades based on personal discretion. What's a good way to "tip" them?)

Whatever you feel might be a fair amount of severance pay for the clerk, if it happens in my barn and I find out about it later. Or at least enough to compensate him or her for the written warning and the several days off he or she is going to get -- if the clerk is new and inexperienced, and I think he or she might be salvageable with a better understanding of how the business works and the occasional issues of ethics involved, and he or she still has a job there at all.

Upgraded and upscale rooms are priced a little higher for a reason.

We give out upgrades (Shoot, we do that more often than we rent the rooms at the full, upgraded rate.) We give out discounts. (Sometimes, I wonder why we even bother having a regular rate: see Michael Forrest Jones' answer to What is and why do hotels have a rack rate? ). But when we do, that's always done for a reason: it has to benefit the hotel in some way. An upgrade or a discount is, when given, the hotel's gift to give, not the clerk's. The clerk is only - or at least only supposed to be - acting on behalf of and in the interests of the hotel.