Hi Alison,
What was wrong with your Langkawi accommodation to make it so bad back then? Intriguing!

Luckily, these days with all the hotel/resort review sites that have cropped up I find it increasingly hard to make a bad choice regarding accommodation. If you trawl through the reviews, and cut out the extremes (i.e. the over-the-top ones flowing with praise that are probably paid for by the hotel! and the gripey ones where people obviously have a grudge/beef with the place or are written by competitors) then I find nowadays you can get a good handle on a place before you visit.