If you haven’t booked a hotel room online yet, you’re in for a treat. Sue and I needed to stay overnight on a long car trip to a relative’s place last week. “Find a hotel half way there,” she says, “Close to the interstate, I don’t want to spend all night looking for the place.”

So I did what every modern traveler does, I go to Google and search the first night’s destination and searched for hotels. A few clicks later, I’m looking at a map of the town with pushpins showing every hotel and motel. Lucky for me, most are near an interstate. Many are very close to the highway. Some are closer to token booths. Because everyone knows how the noise of high-speed traffic soothes frayed nerves. The few hotels that weren’t next to noisy super highways were next to airports.

But how to choose among them? I’ve never stayed in a hotel in this town before. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could ask travelers who had stayed in these places what they thought? Then I saw a button I don’t remember seeing before. Next to each hotel was a link that read, “12 reviews,” “34 reviews.” Yes, I would.