Why Quality and Quantity of Online Travel Reviews Matter

When it comes to online travel reviews, hoteliers need to be concerned about both quality and quantity. Quality reviews allow prospective guests to learn more about the hotel through a fellow guest’s experience. Since so many people are visiting review sites before booking rooms, good reviews lead to increased sales.

While many hoteliers understand that the quality of their reviews is important, many don’t realize that the number of reviews they get is just as important. Why? The most obvious answer is that old reviews containing outdated, or, god forbid, negative reviews, will continue to be shown to potential customers if you don’t have new reviews to replace them. Bad reviews sitting too long on your listing will impact bookings for many many months on end. For example, let’s imagine that you just renovated your lobby but you only have a few old reviews and they mention your gloomy lobby.  If these reviews are written on a site that doesn’t allow review responses, prospective customers will never know that these issues were corrected. Second, who wants to read old reviews? When I visit a review site, I want to read current reviews. If there aren’t any, I will assume that there’s nothing interesting or noteworthy about the hotel and I will likely keep looking. Finally, hoteliers should care because TripAdvisor pays a lot of attention to the number of good reviews that a hotel gets and uses the number as part of the algorithm to determine a hotel’s popularity index. If you want your hotel to show up near the top, you will need a lot of recent reviews.

So now that you know why quantity is important, you need to ensure that your guests start reviewing your hotel. Hotel consultant, Daniel Craig, has provided a list of best practices for getting reviews. Please visit his blog to read more.