How to rate hotel reviews

You’re about to visit Venice for the first time, but how to pick a hotel?

The growth of the social Internet – where communities of participants exchange views and information online – has also seen an increase in the number of website offering travellers the opportunity to rate their experiences. One outcome of this has been an explosion of the number of personal reviews of hotels and other accommodation. I know, because I’ve posted quite a few reviews myself. 

Now, if you look at the ratings of a hotel, you may find fifty, or a hundred and fifty reviews, depending on the popularity and location of the hotel. The reviews will typically range from five star to one star, depending on how good the experience of the reviewer was. The site will then average all the reviews to give an establishment say, three and a half stars, or four, and so on, giving the reader an instant idea of what the standard of the hotel is.

However with so many rated hotels, so many reviews, and a limited time to make a choice, how to you work through these ratings? To complicate things more, a hotel will almost without exception have review ratings that vary from one star to five. How can people stay at the same hotel and have such divergent experiences? I’ve read reviews on the Danieli in Venice, probably THE place to stay, and can’t believe people having nothing good to say about it.

And then, increasingly, there’s the issue of fraudulent reviews. Some hotels are even in a ‘review war’ with their opposition, posting nasty and glowing reviews on respectively their opposition’s and their own hotels. Sneaky, isn’t it? Sometimes it’s simple ignorance. I once told a guest house owner, who was fairly new to the Internet, about a review site, and he promptly went and out of sheer ignorance plastered his own reviews on it, and worse, started taking on reviewers and commentators who had complaints.

All this means that travellers seeking opinions on hotels online have to become increasingly ‘review-savvy’ and be able to read between the lines a lot of the time.

Here are a few tips when hunting for your next holilday accommodation online, and judging the reviews and comments:

• Look at a hotel’s ratings across more than one website. It helps to compare comments and reviews across two or three websites. Different websites often cater for different audiences, and you may find a variance in the ‘flavour’ of the reviews. For instance, venere.com attracts mostly reviews by European travellers, while tripadvisor.com seems to attract mostly American and British reviews.

• What complaints to the one star ratings have? These ratings are generally done by ‘the-glass-is-half-empty types of people, yet they’ll give you an idea of what the worst is you can expect. I mean, how bad can a five star hotel be? But these ratings may help you if, for instance, you’re sensitive to noise, dirty bathrooms, and other particular niggles. They’ll also sometimes serve as warnings against certain rooms in a hotel that should be avoided. However they seldomly accurately depict the total experience of a hotel.

• If a review is to good to be true, it probably is. No seasoned traveller will ever use word like ‘gorgeous’, ‘fantastic’, and ‘absolutely brilliant’ in a review, and if they do, it’ll be sparingly and backed up with verifiable facts. Don’t take reviews that sound like television ads seriously.

• Look at the types of reviews a reviewer has done previously. On most websites clicking on the reviewer name will show all the reviews they’ve done, and that will also give you an idea of the consistency and character of a reviewer, and to some extent their trustworthiness.

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