May 8, 2012 - The hotel industry is currently obsessed with social media.  It is particularly obsessed with guest reviews on sites like TripAdvisor and the major Online Travel Agency (OTA) sites.  Review scores and volumes affect a hotel’s business, and – increasingly – executive compensation, as more and more hotel companies link general managers’ bonuses to their hotels’ performance on review sites.  This week Hotel Compete is proud to launch the Guest Review Rankings Report.  This brand new resource provides hotels, analysts and other interested parties a brand new perspective on review scores across major lodging markets.

The Untapped Opportunity of the Wisdom of Crowds

Hotels’ social media capabilities have progressed considerably over the last couple of years, with Reputation Management the main focus of an increasing level of activity.  But despite the great strides that hotels have made in interacting with reviews, the industry is still missing an analytical opportunity. 

Industry wisdom has it that hotel review scores are unreliable, because reviewers tend to post reviews when they are either very happy or very unhappy with their experience in a hotel.  But the data does not support that preconception.  In fact, research shows that similar hotels in the same market tend to attract similar and consistent scores.  Hence, over or under-performance relative to the average can have a significant impact on performance. If analysts can understand what constitutes average performance, and how hotels compare to that average, it can help to predict future hotel performance.

How to Keep Track of Hotel Review Performance

The challenge both for individual hotels and hotel analysts is that no good baseline exists for comparing hotel reviews across multiple sites.  Different review sites use different scales, and gather responses and compile scores in different ways.  To compare scores across sites is to compare apples with oranges, so market-level analysis tends to focus on individual review sites.  Multi-site comparison can be done using one of the many analysis tools currently available, but it’s up to the hotel to select its own comp set.  And anyone who reads this site knows our views on the shortcomings of hotel comp set selection.

It’s time for an objective way to compare hotel review performance on an “Apples-to-Apples” basis.  Hotel Compete’s Guest Review Rankings Report has been designed to solve exactly this problem.  This bi-weekly report – which is based on the top 25 US hotel markets – provides regularly updated Guest Review Rating scores for every single hotel in each market. 

Hotel review scores are a great predictor of hotel performance, provided you understand them.  The scores in this report are represented on a 1-10 scale, making it easy to compare properties in the same hotel class, as well as overall market rankings.  Please visit the Hotel Compete Guest Review Rankings Report to learn more.

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