I got very confused when I started on Trivago and think this puts off a lot of people when basically once you grasp the rules its pretty easy.

Ok you have a hotel or an attraction that you want to review.

First search regions for town.

If the town exists, there will be a Add Hotel or Attraction button and all that is pretty straightforward.

If the town does not exist, ask your mentor (noted on your page) how to add the town. They will normally do it for you and tell you when it is added.

Takes a bit of getting used to but I like the layout.

It's true, trivago IS a quite complex content management system. This is the reason why we introduced our mentor system. Each user gets assigned a mentor upon registration. This mentor has at least user level 5 and is supposed to help his mentees to get started. If you get the hang of it, you will find a vibrant community with lots of choices to participate in and last but not least payrates are better than what you know from ciao or dooyoo.

My mentor has been great - but I've also had loads of help from newfloridian and Sascha. There's a really strong will from the members to help new people to get the hang of this site and people have really gone out of their way to help.

The only weird things is that because I don't have any rating rights and most stuff's in German, I don't feel pressure to read much.

I was thinking about that too. Not sure when we get the ability to rate, but will certainly rate those that rated me. My mentor has been extremely useful as well as Sascha who has had the patience of a saint.

Rating: You can rate other users' review from level 4 on. There is a logical structure to the system of user levels:

- in the "rookie" levels 1, 2 and 3 you can only add content - and almost everything you submit is checked and/or rated by other users.
- in the advanced levels 4, 5 and 6 you can check/rate/verify others users' contributions (starting with the right to rate reviews in level 4 and incrementally expanding to the right to confirm hotel information entered by other users in level 6) - but contributions you have made yourself still have to be verified.
- In the senior levels (7 and higher) you can add content without verification by other users.

Yes, the community is very helpful. And yes, there is a lot of German content at the moment, but the UK side is catching up. Normally German content should be invisible to you unless you checked "German" as one of your languages in your settings. Then both German and English content will be displayed.