I have reservations at the Doubletree for the fall. Never been, but I research and research and keep coming back to it as the right place for us. I did find a fair number of newer video reviews. You never know if these are 100% legit, but it was still nice to see the place:
I also generally find Oyster helpful for reviews.
https://www.oyster.com/orlando/hote...by-hilton-orlando-disney-springs-area/photos/
Lastly, though I consider absolutely any hotel review sites online to be fishy and unreliable, I often look at Google reviews and sort by "recent." You'll get wildly different reviews, but do that for a couple of weeks and you'll get a good sense of what type of reviews people are putting in on a day-to-day basis - kind of the vibe of things. You'll always get drastically different views in any hotel.
Another rule of thumb is to pay close attention to people's expectations. I'm a huge audio nut, and some high-end audio gear gets terrible reviews while absolute junk gets 5-star reviews. In large part, it's due to expectations. The high-end listeners are super fussy and complain endlessly about relatively minor defects, whereas the average consumer could care less. If they can hear sounds, it's 5 stars.
So with hotels, pay close attention to whether "dated" means "dirty, grim, and worn down" or "dated" means "I'm used to 5-star Hilton's with the latest amenities and I feel insulted that the sparkling clean and spacious room has last year's color scheme and the flat screen TV is not an OLED."
Final tip - when you look at a site like TripAdvisor, if one of the reviews is particularly compelling (i.e. bad or good) look at the user's history of reviews. That will help you decide if the review is legit (and not a plant by either the hotel itself or an adversary - they do that) and if the person is sane. A person with 3 reviews, all in the Orlando area, and all complaining about how bad all the resorts are near B smells a lot like B trying to cut down the competition. (I'm not saying B does that, just an example of what you see sometimes, though more likely overseas.) Similarly, if it's a person with 50 reviews and 90% are negative, that tells you something or if they almost always review 5-star hotels and then dis the Doubletree, that tells you something.
A perfect reviewer, IMO, is someone who has a pretty normal pattern of reviews - 20+ reviews over a number of years and locations with a mix of high and low scores from properties similar to the one I'm looking at. That's more trustworthy in my book.
Oh, and final-final tip, which is what you're doing now. Asking on a forum like this is going to give you skewed results because the sample size is so small (and there's always the risk of a "hotel plant") but you're likely to get real-person reviews and a chance to interact a bit.
As you can see, I do my homework on hotels. I'm going with the Doubletree, despite a few concerns, so take from that what you will. Happy to discuss more if you're interested.
