Further Hotel Rating Comments

Aloha Kakou:

Continuing our discussion of hotel ratings, their meaning and veracity, the below article from independenttraveler.com gives good perspective between OTA (on-line travel agencies, like Expedia and Orbitz) rating systems and ratings by actual travellers on sites like tripadvisor.com.

The article gives the examples of two different hotels, one of which has a higher aggregate rating from the OTAs than it does from the travellers and the other with higher traveler ratings than those given by the OTAs.

Some lessons to be learned are:

1. Do not assume that 1, 2, 3 or 4 stars, diamonds or widgets mean the same thing between different rating systems - the best thing to do is to find the key to the ratings so you know how each property is actually being rated. OTA rating systems, for example, bear little resemblance to those used by Mobile or AAA, even though they all use a 1 to 5 scale.

2. Comments and reviews made by independent travelers are just that - independent. They bear no relation to anything except that particular person's experiences and expectations. The best way to judge these comments is to look for a theme among the comments for the same property. If ten out of twelve reviews mention the nearby train tracks, for example, you can be pretty sure that it is an issue for that property. Conversely, if one review mentions the crabby front desk staff and the other eleven either don't make mention or comment in glowing terms, you can be pretty sure who was really crabby that day. Also, some sites such as tripadvisor.com let you see all of the reviews of a particular reviewer, so you can get some idea as to that reviewer's actual frame of mind - if all of their reviews are rating properties as 5 star, they're either easily impressed, not very particular or very fortunate!

http://www.independenttraveler.com/resources/article.cfm?AID=629&category=13