A 3.6 out of 5 might
sound like a respectable score, but when that's ascribed to a hotel you’re
visiting or considering adding to your program, you might want to look
elsewhere, according to Hotel Compete CEO Jim Rozell.
As part of his company's
analysis of lodging industry performance, Rozell has taken a thorough look at
online reviews. On TripAdvisor, for example, about 80 percent of the hotels
score between a 3.6 and a 4.1.
"A 3.6 in some
markets is a horrible hotel, with a much greater percentage of bad reviews,"
he said.
Hotel Compete, which
provides intelligence reports and analytics to hotel operators, rescores hotels
based on these review spreads and redistributes them on a standardized scale.
Hoteliers then can use that and other market data to evaluate their hotel and
determine whether their pricing is appropriate.
While some hoteliers dismiss
reviews—assuming only angry or extremely happy travelers are motivated to write
them, thereby skewing scores—Rozell said his research indicated they actually
are fairly accurate representations of the public perceptions.
Major chains certainly
do not dismiss reviews. Wyndham Worldwide executive vice president of marketing
Flo Lugli has said her company is working to enable property-level teams to
monitor and respond to reviews. "We'll then aggregate on a regional basis,
a brand basis and a scorecard basis across all our brands so we can see how we're
doing," she said. "We're in the early stages of looking at how we can
integrate this into our operations processes."
Some hotels outsource
review responses. The problem, and one of the hotel industry's not-so-well-kept
secrets, is that these responses often are written by college students who want
to earn a few extra bucks and who never have set foot inside the hotels in
question, Rozell said. Such services, he suggested, likely will be short-lived.
"There's a ton of
money being thrown at companies who do this, but from a business model, it's a
risk because it's only a matter of time before people realize they're being
duped," he said. "Our spin is we aren't a tool to respond to reviews.
It's, 'How are these reviews affecting your business?' "
As hotels and data firms
get a better grasp on interpreting online reviews, they could begin having a
bigger impact on the corporate travel sector. Rozell, for one, said a global
distribution system operator had expressed interest in using the data during corporate
clients' hotel bidding processes to help them determine whether they are
getting a good deal in pricing.