Site lauds 2 motels in Bar Harbor

BAR HARBOR – Two local hotels have been a big enough hit with their customers that they’ve been selected among several hundred hotels worldwide as winners in an annual travelers’ choice competition.

The Bayview Motel and Bar Harbor Motel, located opposite each other on Route 3 where outer Eden Street extends north toward Hulls Cove, have been named in TripAdvisor’s 2006 Travelers’ Choice Awards in the “best bargain” category for the United States. The awards are based on traveler reviews and opinions that get posted on the TripAdvisor Web site, www.tripadvisor.com, which is billed as the world’s largest travel community.

TripAdvisor’s Brooke Ferencsik said Friday that each year the firm goes through the postings on its Web site and picks award-winners based on what people say about lodging establishments where they have stayed. Visitors to the Web site also get to rate, on a scale of one to five, the overall quality of each hotel and specific features such as value, rooms, location, cleanliness and others.

The Bar Harbor Motel, which came in second in the nationwide category, and the Bayview Hotel both are closed for the winter but will reopen in May. According to the official Web site for The Bayview, it also won an award from TripAdvisor last year in the United States luxury category.

The average cost of a room at hotels in the “best bargain” category is $117 per night, according to TripAdvisor.

Ferencsik said that the appeal and value of TripAdvisor is that the reviews come from people whose only connection to the lodging industry is as customers. Information from other sources on hotels frequently is provided by the hotels themselves or by professional marketers, he said.

“TripAdvisor is all about unbiased truth from real travelers,” Ferencsik said.

For example, in keeping with its promise “to provide the whole truth about travel, the good, the bad and the ugly,” TripAdvisor also posts uncomplimentary information about hotels on its Web site. On its home page, for example, it lists the Top 10 dirtiest hotels in the United States, four of which are in Florida and none of which are in New England.

In all, TripAdvisor recognized 345 hotels worldwide this year in separate award categories for luxury, bargains, hidden gems, pools, families, inn and B&Bs, romance and service.