Huh, interesting, and I'm surprised I hadn't heard of Fodor's. I work at http://www.oyster.com/ -- we're kind of the anti-TripAdvisor as all hotels are visited and photographed by our pro photographers and reviewers. We've found the same thing with UGC in the hotel space. For the popular hotels on TripAdvisor, there are 1000s of reviews, and the aggregate rating is always 3-4 stars. In contrast, on Oyster.com there's one review written with the same guidelines as all the other hotel reviews (as well as 100s of high-quality, non-staged photos).
Man, I'm 30 and this makes me feel old. :) In the print travel guides market, it's one of the big names. It comes from the generation before the more backpacker-oriented guides (Lonely Planet, Rough Guides, etc.) and targets more of an upper-middle-class family vacation type of audience, but it's still fairly popular, within the print-travel-guides space.
It does seem that their move into digital guides is quite recent and incomplete, though.
Ya, I get that a lot.... I guess with less bookstores around, we have a lot less notoriety. You're right, high number of crowd ratings regress to some mediocre mean, less absolute dump 1 stars, less stellar 5 stars, i guess.
