I’ve noticed that when you mention the name Tripadvisor to accommodation providers, the vast majority give an involuntary shudder.
Due to some genuine bad experiences, there seems to be a widespread assumption amongst businesses that Tripadvisor reviews accentuate the negative.
Yet I am an avowed Tripadvisor user and I have only ever given two negative reviews. I have chosen accommodation I wouldn’t have otherwise heard of based on the glowing reviews of other users - and I’m sure I am not alone.
So is there more than my anecdotal experience to demonstrate that the user reviews on Tripadvisor are not bad news for good businesses? It just so happens there is!
I’ve done some quick research for this post by looking at the user ratings of 108 local Inverness area accommodation providers reviewed on Tripadvisor. Where available, I cross-referenced these user-generated scores with the Scottish industry quality assurance/star ratings for those same businesses, using other data sources.
What I found is that Tripadvisor reviewers are not only far more generous than you might think (the most common score is four out of five) – but fewer than 20% of accommodation providers are rated lower by visitors than their quality assurance rating would suggest.
Not only that, but it’s the little guys that fare best of all.
I sliced and diced the user ratings by accommodation type and discovered that it is actually the B&Bs of Inverness who score highest on Tripadvisor.
The trends are far more positive than negative
More than 50% of accommodation businesses I looked at are rated 4 out of five or above by Tripadvisor reviewers. The average (mean) is a little lower at 3.8, pulled down by the handful of very poor performers.
More than 50% of businesses also receive a rating from user reviewers that is higher than their Quality Assurance rating. Yes, the QA rating is looking at different and very specific factors, but it is a sign of a very positive visitor experience when a two star establishment can get a 4.0 Tripadvisor rating because it delivers that 2 star experience extremely well indeed.
Whether it is a reflection on the wisdom of crowds or wisdom of the QA assessors, fewer than 20% of accommodation providers are rated lower by visitors than their star rating would suggest. So who are those establishments with Tripadvisor ratings lower than their QA scores? They were almost exclusively 5 or 4 star B&Bs. Their visitors rated them either 0.5 points or 1 point lower than the QA rating and while I haven’t done a full text analysis of comments, I suspect that poor warmth of welcome/friendliness may have been a factor in some of these cases.
So to conclude - don’t bury your head in the sand. If you have a good product and good people, have faith that the majority of Tripadvisor reviewers are not out to get you. In fact, they’re likely to be pretty generous!
Let me know if you’d like to see more of this data and I’ll do a follow up post.
This entry was posted on Friday, March 14th, 2008 at 2:14 pm and is filed under Online customer behaviour, Research tools, Social media measurement, Tourism market research, Tourism statistics, Travel 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.