Watching the first of the new series of Channel Five’s Hotel Inspector on Thursday made me wonder how properties like The Grand in Hastings ever get clients through their doors. Peeling paint, a reception halfway up the stairs, dirty bathrooms, illegal cables on the kettles, tables held up with beermats, grungy towels, inedible food... the list goes on. This is a hotel that had been operating for 20 years, its owner describing himself as a “lazy dinosaur”.

The sad thing is, it isn’t unique. Our seaside resorts are overrun with the most dreadful hotels imaginable. Of course, there are also some fantastic ones out there – a trip to Brighton will refuel anyone’s trust in Britain’s seaside hotels, particularly if you stay at the eccentric but chic Blanch House. But there is still a plethora of properties that are, frankly, an embarrassment to our hospitality industry.

“There is so much appalling bedstock in this country, it’s just not true,” Ruth Watson, Channel Five’s nononsense inspector, told me. “I want to go around and blow them all up.” No wonder then that the budget chains are flourishing. You know what you're getting, even if there isn’t much character.

Separating the wheat from the chaff is easy if you have a good guidebook, though you have to be sure that it reflects your tastes: my own lean towards Alastair Sawday’s collection of quirky, charming places to stay.

Our Mystery Guest column, done, as its name suggests, completely undercover, is also a good place to start. This week, we take a look at Watson’s own hotel, the Crown and Castle at Orford (even an inspector isn’t above being inspected).

Review websites such as Trip Advisor are playing an important role to anyone booking a hotel: it attracts up to four million visitors a month from the UK and two months ago it launched a traveller’s network for reviewers to keep in contact with each other – a holidaymakers’ Facebook.

The website has come in for a fair battering over the issue of bogus favourable reports posted by hotel owners but, as Holiday Which? concludes in a report this week, with a little common sense it can be a valuable research tool. Not only that, but hoteliers care about the reviews they receive, and react to negative postings by trying to improve things.

The problem with Trip Advisor, though, isn’t the potential for fake reports, it’s the fact that although it’s growing at an enormous rate, it is still far from comprehensive, so hotels such as The Grand in Hastings don’t feature on its radar.

Which means it’s time to start voting with our keyboards. If students on Facebook can get HSBC to do a volte face on overdraft fees, surely we, the travelling public, can start a revolution in our hotels.

When you go away, take five minutes out to write reviews of places you visit, good or bad. The “lazy dinosaur” at The Grand didn’t make any changes until Watson got under his skin so much that he was prepared to do almost anything to shut her up. Now the hotel has improved on every front.

So get online, not just on Trip Advisor – you can also post a comment against the relevant hotel at timesonline.co.uk/wheretostay. Now there’s no excuse.