Category Archives: Announcements

Announcements

How the TripExpert score helps you find amazing hotels

There are times in life when unpredictability is a good thing. Booking a hotel is not one of them. When you take that long awaited vacation, you want the luxury hotel you’ve been dreaming of, and not an overpriced room stuck in the 1980s. When you travel for business, you want a hotel with the amenities you need in a convenient location, and not frat house with no wifi.
Until now, there has been no objective way to measure a hotel’s quality. You could reply on amateur reviews (which, if not fake, are highly subjective and unreliable) or you could dig up that one travel guide you bought in 1993 and hope the listings are still relevant.
No more.
The TripExpert Score is the first objective measure of a hotel’s quality based on reliable reviews. It allows you to find the best hotel at any price-point in thousands of destinations across the world. The TripExpert Score allows you to know what you’re going to get when you travel, and to know that it will be great.

Calculating the TripExpert Score

Simply put, the TripExpert Score takes into account how many publications have recommended a hotel, the reliability of the publications, and what they’ve said about the hotel.
But the algorithm itself is not simple; it is a complex yet elegant tool designed to help you find the best hotels. Here’s how it works.

What a publication says

When we talk about “what” a publication has said, we mean scores (e.g. “3 stars”) and rating categories (“critic’s pick”, “editor’s choice”), as well as any textual descriptions (“the best hotel in Berlin”) that appear in the body of the review and that are noted by our editors.

Some publications are weighted more than others

All of our reviews are written by professionals. However, publications are given different weights in calculating the TripExpert Score. This is not because we subjectively favor some publications over others, but because some publications provide us with stronger quality signals than others. A publication that has a numeric rating system, and that rates a very large number of hotels is especially useful. For example, the Michelin Guide and Frommer’s are given a lot of weight because they have a simple, globally applicable numeric rating system that is applied to a large number of hotels.

Some reviews are weighted more than others

Even within a particular publication, some reviews are given more weight than others. A recently published review is generally more valuable than an older review. A review is especially useful if it is for a new hotel that has only recently started to receive coverage in the media; if a couple of publications give it stellar reviews, it is probably a great hotel even if it has so far only been reviewed by a small number of publications.

Scores need to be considered in context

A hotel that has 4 stars in Frommer’s is better (according to Frommer’s) than one that has 3 stars. But how much better, and how much of an impact should this have on the hotels’ TripExpert Scores? To answer this question, our algorithm takes into account a number of factors, including:

  • •  Where is the hotel, and how did Frommer’s score other hotels in the same place?
  • •  What price category is the hotel in, and how did Frommer’s score other hotels in that price category?
  • • What is the average rating in Frommer’s, globally and in the relevant destination?

Interpreting the TripExpert Score

The TripExpert Score is intended to be intuitively understandable. However, for those interested, here are some “expert” tips for interpreting it:

  • •  Scores range from 60-100. We describe 60-70 as recommended; 70-80 as very good; 80-90 as excellent; and 90-100 as outstanding.
  • •  Scores are intended mostly to provide guidance within a particular destination. A hotel that scores 90 in New York City is better, according to experts, than a hotel that scores 80.
  • •  Scores also provide guidance between destinations. A hotel that scores 90, regardless of where it is located, is an outstanding hotel. (For an important qualification, see “Aren’t your scores too low?”)
  • •  All hotels on TripExpert are recommended. A property is listed on TripExpert only if it has been endorsed by multiple experts. There are certainly some average hotels on the site, but we hope that there are no bad hotels. Or, at least, a hotel listed on TripExpert is one that experts consider to be one of the best in the area. All of the hotels in the area may be “bad”, but they’re the best bad.

FAQ

Here are some answers to questions we’re often asked about the TripExpert Score.

Why should I trust professional reviewers?

These are people who have made it their job to provide the best advice to travelers. They’ve usually lived in the place they’re writing about, and they know the neighborhoods, transit routes, and other salient information much better than almost everyone who posts a review on a user review website. They’ve stayed in or visited multiple hotels, and they know which to recommend. As Arthur Frommer — the pioneer of the modern travel guide — says in his endorsement of TripExpert, many of these are people who have “devoted their careers to the subject matter and built major reputations based on the worth of their reviews”.

Are the results better than user review sites?

Yes. Much better. We’ve written extensively about why user reviews don’t work. We also have a blog post that compares the #1 hotel on TripExpert and TripAdvisor for various destinations.

Why are some of your scores so low?

In very big cities, where there is a lot of competition among excellent hotels, average TripExpert Scores tend to be lower. We do this for a reason. There are probably at least 50 outstanding hotels in New York City, and if we gave them all a TripExpert Score of 90, the number would stop being a useful way of determining which is best. We therefore “spread” them out across a wider range. This means that some great hotels in New York have scores that are slightly lower than they would have been if they had been located in, say, Kansas City. We think that this is the correct outcome. Most people are looking to make a decision about which hotel to stay at in a particular place, and so our main goal is to provide the best experience to facilitate this decision. In addition, the wider range of scores reflects the fact that a visitor to New York has a wider range of options.

Conclusion

All this talk of algorithms may seem complicated. And, on some level, it is. There’s a reason why no one else has successfully created a comparable hotel rating system until we did it. As you can see, there’s a lot that goes into creating an objective measure of a hotel’s quality. But travel is such an important part of life. With some much money and emotional investment at stake, we believe that information is power, and we aim to give you as much power as possible to make the best decisions on where to stay. Happy travels!

Announcements, Data Science

Arthur Frommer and the importance of experts

To travel before Arthur Frommer published his first eponymous guide in 1957 was to experience anxiety and uncertainty.
If you were lucky enough to have a personal connection to somebody with experience in the locale you planned to visit, you might have an idea of what to expect, where to stay, and what to eat.

Even then, you had to hope their memory was infallible and the destination was in the same condition as they remembered it; that no hotels had changed hands or gone through difficult periods, and that better options hadn’t recently opened.
Most travelers didn’t have the luxury of personal recommendation. They had second or third hand advice from unreliable or biased sources, and their travel experience suffered for it. The luxury hotel that wasn’t, the vastly overpriced, the loud hotel where you were promised peace and quiet, the dirty and worn; these were common the travel experiences in the time before reliable hotel reviews.
Arthur Frommer and other mid-century travel experts such as Eugene Fodor changed that dynamic forever. They possessed a modern perspective for an audience who wanted to know the best place to stay at various price-points. They had a vast store of comparative knowledge and were able to recognize and highlight the outstanding (and the not-so-outstanding). Now if you wanted to travel to Paris, Miami, or Tokyo, you didn’t need to know somebody; you could easily consult their professional reviews.
Much has changed in the past several decades. There are more places to stay than ever, and finding reliable advice is a challenge. Review sites such as TripAdvisor and Yelp can contain useful reviews written by experienced and knowledgeable travellers. But they’re also flooded with poor reviews influenced by any number of biases and shortcomings that readers are unaware of. Amateur reviewers often penalize hotels for reasons tangential or irrelevant to their overall quality.  Up to 40% of the reviews may be fake. We’re once again making important travel decisions based on unreliable and biased sources.
In a letter to the TripExpert team, Arthur Frommer highlights some of these problems:

“I have been surprised by the occasional popularity of the so-called “user-generated” websites that print recommendations or critiques of hotels and restaurants, written by amateurs who have been once in their lives to one hotel in the destination city or eaten one meal at a similarly-located restaurant.  …[T]hose write-ups seem less than reliable…”

There is a better way. Practical and useful advice for the today’s traveler written by an impartial professional with a vast store of experiences to draw from for valid comparisons still exists and the internet gives us unprecedented access to it. At TripExpert, we’ve aggregated the opinions of the greatest and most experienced travel minds. We give you the ability to quickly and intuitively parse expert opinion in the largest ever collection of expert reviews offered through a single service.  Our TripExpert Score is an objective measure of a hotel’s quality based on professional reviews.
With TripExpert, you can easily find the best hotel within your budget for the destinations you want to visit.  It’s once again a revolution in how we travel. Arthur Frommer, deservedly, gets the last word:

“I have welcomed the arrival of TripExpert.com, which prints recommendations and critiques written by experienced travel journalists, most of whom have devoted their careers to the subject matter and built major reputations based on the worth of their reviews.”