Read Travel Reviews with Caution
Think of your favorite restaurant that you know well. Then go to Yelp or Trip Advisor or any similar online review site. When you read the reviews I'm sure you'll be surprised at just how much a reviewer can get wrong. Often times this is because their expectations are unrealistic or they are the type of person who always complains no matter what. There is another possibility that is becoming more and more common: it's fake.
As online reviews and reputations have become more and more important to the success of a business, new services have sprung up that offer restaurants, hotels, etc, the promise of overly-good reviews for them, and even overly-bad reviews for their competitors, often from reviewers who have never actually been to the destination. This makes choosing the best business quite difficult and impractical to weed through the misinformation unless you know someone who has actually been to the destination. This is where a travel planner comes in.
The right travel planner will take away the stress of all the research and experience needed to know the best options for a well planned vacation. Especially when you only have a certain number of vacation days from work, it's important to get the most from those few days and not leave anything to chance. I have visited countless hotels in each destination, and it never ceases to amaze me how the hotels that are the best marketed and reviewed online are not always the best hotels, and vise versa. A good travel professional has personally researched the destination, and as many aspects as possible of the experience.
Planning the right vacation can be stressful, and online reviews can create as many questions as they answer. If you would like to maximize your enjoyment out of a vacation you've wanted to take for years, it only makes sense to leave the details to a professional.