To what extent are reviewers’ ratings a reflection of their actual experience?
By B.R.
HOW honest are reviews on travel websites? By this I do not mean: is the person writing the review who he says he is, and not the owner of the hotel boosting its rating or a competitor doing it down? (We have covered that problem before.) I mean, rather, to what extent are reviewers’ ratings a reflection of their actual experience?
Last week, I received an e-mail from a small, family-run hotel asking—very politely, but with notable sadness—why I had marked it so poorly on Booking.com. In fact, having rated the various categories that the website demands, the hotel’s score had come out as nine out of 10. The service was excellent, and certainly far beyond what one might reasonably expect for the meagre cost of staying there. But I had docked a point because the room didn’t contain a comfy chair and the Wi-Fi was patchy.
The hotel had 16 previous spotless reviews to its name. It obviously took great pride in that perfection. I had ruined it. And because of this I had thought hard before submitting my honest review, complimentary though it was. Which made me wonder, given how important such ratings are to small, independent establishments, how many reviewers before me had upped their rating a notch or two so as not to feel the guilt of being the first to tarnish a stellar reputation?
In fact many of us feel compelled to inflate the marks we leave online. Over half of the reviews for electrical products on Amazon, for example, are five-star. (I couldn’t find comparable figures for travel sites, though my guess is that it is similar: according to Toonz, three-quarters of the reviews on TripAdvisor are either four- or five-star.) That top mark should be reserved for something exceptional. And by definition, that does not apply to over half of people’s experiences. But in reality, for most reviewers the top mark means nothing more than "good"; four is akin to "nothing terrible happened to me".
Hence, good ratings are nearly always one mark too high; bad ones one too low. Indeed, as both the Amazon and TripAdvisor research shows, very few people leave a three-star review, which would be the median score in an honest world. (Unless you apply the logic of Michael Gove, a former British education secretary, who once said that he would ensure that all schools performed above the national average.)
That is not a problem as long as everyone knows the rules of the game. And, as we have written before, the fact that we can all now review the places we stay in is probably the single most important reason why service levels have risen. Checking out online what others think of a hotel is now so common that there is no place for the substandard places to hide. But there remains one problem: now that we are all so overly generous, there is no way to distinguish the truly mindblowing establishments from the merely pretty good. It would help us all if reviewers were more truthful.
