At TripExpert, we’ve built a database of nearly 600,000 professional reviews in over 500 destinations around the globe. In addition to aggregating reviews, we’ve also created a massive archive of over 1.2 million photos of hotels, restaurants, and tourist attractions, which together occupy about 275GB of space on Amazon S3.
After seeing so many wanderlust-inducing images, we’ve learned a few lessons about how to optimize your photographs and how potential guests interact with them. If you manage a hotel or restaurant or you’re photographing one, read on for our tips.
1. Hire a professional
It is easy to see the amount of energy spent on hotel photos by the quality of the images presented on your website. I don’t mean megapixels, I mean the amount of care that went into composing each of the photos you present of your property to your potential guests. Since this is the first impression your clients will have of your venue, it is worth bringing in a professional rather than taking a few snaps with your cell phone. 2. Get the rights right
When hiring a photographer, be sure you get the rights to use your images and to distribute them for use by third parties. Several hotels have sent me to the photographer, only to have the photographer ask for a fee to use the hotel’s photos. It is hard out there for artists and they’ve got to be compensated for their work, but a website promoting your venue shouldn’t be footing the bill. Pay your photographer enough for them to allow you to do what you want with the images later on.
Shoot through door frames to add depth, like Florence’s Hotel Savoy
3. Choose the best gallery
On your website, use an HTML-based gallery instead of a Flash gallery. Flash doesn’t work on iPhones and prevents your photos from being captured (except via screenshot). Make sure you choose a gallery that is responsive: it should work on web and mobile (and should support mobile touchscreen commands like swiping between photos). At TripExpert, we use FlexSlider. 4. Make it easy for others to get access
Although you may feel the desire to “lock down” your images to your own site, keep in mind that you’re trying to sell your property: it is in your best interests to make sure your images are easy to access. You don’t want a post about your hotel to go viral with a bad photo. If you chose to screen the outlets who receive your images, make sure it is easy for them to find a contact email address so they can reach out. Making images available to only a select few is a common practice with larger hotels. Be sure you make your press section as clear as possible with updated contact information.
If you’re unable to hire a photographer right now, here are some basic tips for photographing a room:
Rome’s Hotel de Russie using natural light and shooting straight & natural light on fleek at DC’s Hay-Adams
Use natural light
This will not only make the room appear sun filled and bright, but will avoid the issue of white balancing multiple lamps. Never heard of white balance? This is a good indication that you should hire a professional. Either way, Ken Rockwell has a great article about white balance and how to set it on your camera. Long exposure is your friend
Another reason why a tripod will come in so handy is because of the length of your exposures. You will need to have a longer exposure to ensure your room is well lit and holding a camera still for 1/3rd of a second can be quite tricky. You can learn a bit about exposure from Cambridge in Colour. Use a tripod
Seems silly, but it makes a world of difference when editing your photos. Slow down and look at the photos you’ve taken to make sure everything is in the right place. Compose them well in the camera so you don’t have to attempt any crazy Photoshopping afterwards. It is also nearly impossible to make a long exposure while hand-holding your camera.
Pro tip: You’ve heard of the Golden Hour, but try photographing your venue just after the sun has set during the Blue Hour. You can capture the rich color of the sky and the benefits of a long exposure.
Don’t use fisheye lenses
I get it – you can see SO much more than with a regular lens, but it just isn’t worth it. Fisheyes distort the room too much and are too distracting. Do you want me to be daydreaming about how weird the walls look or how comfy your bed looks? In the event you have an underwater property and you are showing the room from the vantage of a fish, you may use a fisheye. Don’t feature people
You want to show people the good times that your hotel has hosted and how luxurious a bubble bath looks, but showing people in your photos just makes me wonder how many people have slept in the room I’m about to stay in. There are few exceptions to showing folks in the guestrooms on your website. This isn’t the time to get creative.
Photography is awesome. The challenge of photographing something and putting your own spin on it is one of the main attractions of the medium, but this isn’t the time to be the next Annie Leibovitz. Shoot straight, as DesignSpunge says. Also, keep your photos in color – it is hard to get the best idea of a room in sepia or black and white. Selective color never works out well, so try to avoid it.
Have some additional questions about photography? Want to chat about cameras? Drop me a line [email protected].
We’ve created sleek embeddable badges to show off your accomplishments in a way that will easily blend into your existing site — simply add a bit of code to your page and you’re all set.
What are some of the benefits to adding a TripExpert badge?
• TripExpert Score – We take all of the reviews of your business and put them through our patent-pending algorithm to generate a score that’s the definitive statement of overall quality. Only the top places in each destination are on TripExpert; the TripExpert Score ranges from 60 to 100.
• Professional Social Proof – Your venue has been endorsed by multiple top tier publications that your future guests know and trust. Guests no longer need to spend time researching across many different platforms.
• All of your reviews and awards in one place – We understand it can be hard to keep up with all of the reviews your venue receives, but we love it. Let our specialized team stay on top of it for you – they know all about our 60+ source publications and always aim to have the most accurate information available. Rather than worry about updating the press section of your website, just link to TripExpert.
• Aid journalists and bloggers – Want to get more reviews of your business? Show the places that have already endorsed your property and keep future journalists in the loop. Bloggers can add the badges to their posts to link to the full list of publications that love your venue.
To get your badges now, find your venue page on TripExpert and click the “Venue support” link located in the sidebar.
Simply copy and paste the HTML into your source code or forward it to your webmaster and you’re all set.
Questions? Drop me a line at [email protected].
There’s so much to do in New York City that you could spend an entire life its five boroughs and not experience all that it has to offer. But what if you only had 24 hours? What is the best possible day you could spend in New York City? What would you do? Where would you eat? Where would you sleep? And how much would it cost?
We have the ability to find out. The TripExpert Score is calculated by a patent-pending algorithm that allows us to examine the critical consensus on all there is to do in New York City (and around the world). By aggregating and analyzing critical reviews (think Rotten Tomatoes meets Nate Silver), we can scientifically calculate the best hotels, restaurants, and attractions in New York City. We can then use these ratings to figure out the ideal 24 hours in the City. This trip is not just one person’s opinion; it’s what the math tells us is the best possible 24-hour trip to NYC.
Want to learn how the TripExpert Score works? Skip to the bottom of the post for a full explanation.
The best 24 hours in New York City
So what would the ultimate 24-hour trip to New York City look like?
Crosby Street Hotel
We’ll start the 24 hour clock by checking into the Crosby Street Hotel, the top rated hotel in NYC. Its “as much gallery as hotel” says Frommers, the rooms are “expansive and sun-light filled” according to Fodors, and Oyster.com loves how the hotel manages to be both “lavish and welcoming”. The Crosby Street Hotel features Bose iPhone docks, heated towel racks, and an on-site movie theater.
We imagine you’ll want to make of all those amenities (as well as potentially visit the rooftop chickens), so we’ll allocate 3 to 4pm as hotel time. At 4pm you’ll hop in a cab to the Brooklyn Museum, the top ranked attraction in Brooklyn and #3 in all of NYC. The 30-minute trip will cost $20 via Uber and we’ll allocate you 90 minutes to peruse NYC’s second-largest art museum.
Brooklyn Museum
According to Lonely Planet, the Brooklyn Museum is “a great alternative to the packed-to-the-gills institutions in Manhattan” and the crowd at your closing time visit should be especially sparse, allowing you quiet contemplation of the museum’s stellar “4,000 piece Egyptian Collection” as well as the “masterworks by Cézanne, Monet and Degas” recommended by Time Out New York.
Closing time is 6pm and we’re off in another Uber, this time heading to Central Park for sunset. The 40-minute trip will set you back $35.
Central Park
Central Park is among New York City’s highest rated attractions. New Yorkers have been coming to the park for over 150 years as a respite from the hectic bustle of New York; take an hour to stroll what Concierge.com calls the “calming yang to the city’s fervent go-go yin.”
Daniel
You’ll want to get changed before your 9:30 dinner reservation, so Uber back to your hotel ($20) before heading to Daniel, NYC’s top rated restaurant. “One of the most elegant dining experiences in Manhattan,” says Fodors. Charles Michener of The New Yorker praises chef Daniel Boulud’s cuisine for its “luxurious, sometimes surprising combinations, which, when all is said and done, seem simple.” This the best possible trip to New York City, so we’re going big. You’ll order the seven course tasting menu for $225, plus the optional wine pairings for another $225. The “very attentive service is a highlight” (Forbes Travel Guide), so we’ll tip 25%, which adds another $112.50, for a total of $562.50.
Grand Central Terminal
By the time you finish dessert it’ll be late, but we have one more attraction to hit before bed. Hop on the 6 train ($2.75) heading south and exit at Grand Central Terminal, New York City’s 3rd highest rated attraction. Walk up from the subway station into the main concourse, described by the Michelin Guide as “one of the most spectacular interior spaces in the city”. It’s late so you won’t have the normal bustle, but the lack of crowds will allow you to marvel at the details of this 1913 masterpiece of engineering, architecture, and art. Many New Yorkers will tell you that this is their favorite place in the city. When you’re done, hop one last Uber back to your room at the Crosby Street Hotel ($12). Tomorrow’s going to be another busy day, so make sure you get some rest.
Sleep well? Considering you stayed at the best hotel in New York City (and taking into account how busy yesterday was), odds are you did. But now is not the time to let up; you still have plenty of time left in your 24-hour New York City trip.
Locanda Verde
Your first stop the next morning is Locanda Verde, New York City’s highest rated restaurant that serves breakfast. Take a pleasant mile-long stroll from the Crosby Street Hotel through Greenwich Village and Tribeca to the restaurant. According to NY Magazine, Locanda Verde’s “crowd pleasing cooking” is “designed to promote a good time in a casually stylish, relatively economical way”. It’ll be a great way to start the day and, for such a highly regarded restaurant (#13 in New York City), not unaffordable at about $40 including tip for a full breakfast.
Ellis Island
After Locanda Verde, you’ll be visiting Ellis Island, New York City’s 5th highest rated attraction. The first ferry to the island leaves from Battery Park at 8:30am, so take a quick $8 Uber down to the dock. Ellis Island, “an icon of mythical proportions,” according to Lonely Planet, was New York’s primary immigration reception facility for over 60 years. The ferry costs $18 and a tour of the hospital is another $25. There’s a lot of history to see, so you’ll have to move quickly.
The Frick Collection
You’ll be back in Manhattan by 10pm. It’s time for another Uber ($25), this one to the last attraction you’ll be visiting: the Frick Collection. This art museum is the highest rated attraction New York City. The museum ($20) is “a real find among the city’s museums” (Concierge.com). “Everything here is a highlight”, says Fodors. Housed in coke and steel magnate Henry Clay Frick’s Fifth Avenue mansion, the Frick Collection, “arguably the best small museum in the nation” (Frommers), “offers a unique opportunity to view an exceptional trove of Old Masters paintings” (Fodors). Take two hours to wander this quiet oasis of art and 19th century extravagance.
Lunch at Per Se
Your 24 hours in New York City is almost up. You’ve done a lot but there is still one more once-in-a-time experience to fit into this trip. Take one last Uber ($8) to your lunch destination, New York City’s second highest rated restaurant, Per Se. This restaurant is Thomas Keller’s Columbus Circle masterpiece. “Rightly recognized as one of the world’s finest restaurants, Per Se is nothing short of spectacular,” says the Michelin Guide. Recently celebrating its 10th anniversary, Per Se has been featured in The World’s 50 Best Restaurants for its entire life. A meal this memorable won’t come cheap; the 5 to 9 course lunch ranges from $205 to $310. You can choose from Per Se’s extensive wine list or bring your own bottle, for a $150 corking fee. Assume with a 9-course lunch and a bottle of wine, plus tip, you spend $575.
With that epic lunch, the best 24-hour trip you can take to NYC is over. You stayed at the best hotel in the city. You ate at three of its best restaurants in less than a 24-hour span (be sure to hit the gym next week). You visited some of its best museums, most impressive monuments, and most treasured parks. You spent $1,912.25 in 24 hours (not counting tips or actually getting to New York City) but you had the best 24 hours you could possibly have (according to science).
About TripExpert’s Scoring System
The rankings described in this article are based on the TripExpert Score. You can read about how the score is calculated on our About Page, but simply put, the TripExpert Score takes into account how many publications have recommended a venue and what they’ve said about the venue, including any score or rating they’ve awarded it. It’s a method not dissimilar from how Nate Silver conducts his poll analysis for fivethirtyeight.com. By looking at a wide range of experts and weighing them based on their reliability, we’re able to generate the most accurate appraisal of quality for hotels, restaurants, and attractions.
Unlike sites such as TripAdvisor and Yelp, we don’t incorporate crowdsourced reviews, or rely on sites that use them. While we do believe these sites have their uses — they’re good at surfacing under-the-radar dining spots that may not come to the attention of travel critics (for example, a great sandwich counter hidden away in a bodega), they suffer from issues that make them unreliable to the point of unusable for the sake of measuring the true quality of a hotel, restaurant, or attraction.
There is more to a memorable trip than just a great hotel, which is why we are excited to announce that we’ve expanded TripExpert to cover restaurants and tourist attractions.
Our goal is to provide you with the best possible travel decision-making tools, and these new features will make any trip better. By aggregating reviews from the best professional critics, curating the reviews by hand (we have real people read every review), and passing them through our patent-pending algorithm, we provide accurate, reliable appraisals that you can trust. TripExpert is now the easiest way to find a great restaurant or something to do in your hometown or in major destinations around the world.
Restaurant and attraction reviews will initially be available for 50 cities, with an additional 150 cities to follow by the end of 2015. The professionally-penned reviews are sourced from the Michelin Guide, Zagat, USA Today, Bon Appétit, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Los Angeles Times, The Denver Post, Travel + Leisure, The Evening Standard, The Independent, and numerous other outlets.
Why are the expert reviews we use to calculate the TripExpert Score more reliable? They’re verified: you know the author’s name and history. They’re less biased: the author’s professional reputation is at stake each and every time they review something. And experts also have more points of comparison: professional critics review hundreds, if not thousands, of venues, which allows them to recommend the best places and provide savvy advice that a regular traveler can’t.
With the launch of TripExpert’s restaurant and attraction reviews, you can be assured of finding the best for any trip you take, whether across the world or across town.
Today we’re thrilled to announce a partnership with HotelsCombined, the world’s leading hotel price comparison website. With this agreement, users of TripExpert can access HotelsCombined’s award-winning aggregation platform to compare and book accommodations from many leading of travel and hotelier websites, including Expedia, Hotels.com, Venere, and Laterooms. Without leaving the TripExpert website, users can now read professional reviews, see the TripExpert Score, and check rates and availability across multiple providers for any of the tens of thousands of hotels on TripExpert.
We’re so confident in HotelsCombined to give our users the best price on hotel accommodations that, from today forward, we’re offering a Best Price Guarantee. If you find a lower rate on your hotel accommodations elsewhere, we’ll refund the difference. For full details, including terms and conditions, visit tripexpert.com/about.
This is another step towards our ultimate goal of providing travelers with the tools and information to consistently have unrivaled travel experiences. When you use TripExpert, you know you’ll find best hotels and the best prices. Guaranteed.
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!
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.”
The Crosby Street Hotel and the Chelsea Pines Inn, New York City
In 1999, at the peak of the dot com bubble, Epinions.com came online. The site allowed regular people to post reviews of consumer products like cameras, books, and toys.
It is difficult to imagine now, but at the time this was a novel idea, and it attracted a lot of interest. The New York Times described the site as a “marketplace for ideas”, and said that the company had become a “lightning rod for talent” in Silicon Valley.
“Epinions” are now pervasive on the web and have become a major factor in consumer decision-making. We rely on non-professional reviews to decide where to dine (Yelp), what household goods to buy (Amazon), what to read (Goodreads), what hotels to stay at (TripAdvisor), and even what doctors to choose (Healthgrades). User reviews have contributed to people making better informed decisions about how to spend their time and money. They have also increased incentives for everyone from restaurant owners to TV makers to improve the quality of their products and services.
But aggregating user reviews does not always produce accurate results. TripAdvisor and Yelp provide us with deliciously definite claims about how places compare to each other, like “#1 in New York City” (a designation that TripAdvisor gives to the hotel pictured at right; more on that later). This post will show that these claims are frequently wrong, especially for hotels and restaurants.
#1 in NYC?
This is not just because some reviewers are misguided or ill-informed, like the Scottish woman who became the 87th best attraction in Glasgow by filling out the wrong form on TripAdvisor, or the gentleman from Hawaii who posted a negative review of a hotel because a nearby beach was too sandy.
Rather, it is because user reviews systematically favor certain establishments over others. The reasons for this fall under three headings: incentives, fake reviews, and demographics.
There are 3 reasons that user reviews fail to produce accurate results & favor some kinds of hotels over others.
Incentives
Who writes reviews — and why? These are the key questions in assessing the reliability of sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor. If certain groups of people are more likely to write reviews, or certain types of experiences are more likely to prompt someone to write a review, the results may be skewed in favor of certain types of places.
We know that reviews tend to be written by people who have had either an exceptionally good or bad experience. This results in a lot of 1- and 5-star reviews. The median customer — someone who had an “OK” experience and who has nothing particularly positive or negative to say — tends to be underrepresented; some fire in the belly is an effective inducement for someone to spend time posting a review. This is not necessarily a problem, however. It does mean that reviews are often full of vitriol and effusive praise. But as long as places attract 1- and 5-star reviews in proportion to how much they deserve them, their overall ratings should accurately reflect customers’ experiences.
The problem is that users frequently write these 1- and 5-star reviews for reasons that are entirely irrelevant to future customers’ potential experiences. Negative reviews, in particular, penalize some kinds of establishments disproportionately to others.
The nightclub penalty
A good example is the “nightclub penalty” on TripAdvisor. This affects hotels that are attached to popular clubs or bars, especially those with a “selective door” (a euphemistic expression used, especially in New York, to refer to bouncers turning away people who are ugly, poorly dressed, or who arrive in a group that has too many men and not enough women).
People often write damning reviews of a hotel they haven’t stayed at because they had a bad experience at its nightclub.
Such hotels are more likely to receive a high number of 1-star reviews than their peers. This is not because they are bad hotels — or because their nightclubs are noisy and cause discomfort to guests. Instead, the reviews are posted by disgruntled revelers who get turned away at the door. Many have not even overnighted at the hotel. A classic example is someone who posted a 1-star review of the Ritz in London 82 because she was wearing jeans and wasn’t allowed into the hotel bar; she thought an exception ought to have been made because hers were by Armani.
For a more in-depth example, consider The Standard High Line in New York. It has a high TripExpert Score; Fodors calls it “one of New York’s hottest hotels” and, as Travel + Leisure notes, virtually every room has stunning views. It’s not perfect; we rank it #51 in New York, and many of the negative reviews on TripAdvisor make valid points about its shortcomings. But its TripAdvisor score, 75, is strangely low, putting it in the bottom half of TripAdvisor’s ranking of New York’s approximately 440 hotels. It’s apparently worse than a Comfort Inn on the Lower East Side (#172) and an Econo Lodge in Times Square (#218). Why? At least part of the reason is that people go on TripAdvisor to complain about how they have been treated by the bouncers or the wait staff at Le Bain, one of the city’s hottest nightlife destinations. The following review is representative:
Just in case you (understandably) didn’t read the whole extract: the reviewer admits to never having stayed at the hotel.
If all hotels had popular nightlife venues, this would not present a problem for a review aggregator. But obviously they do not. Using TripExpert data to provide a baseline for comparison, we can explore the effects of the nightclub penalty. The following table shows all hotels in New York that score very well on TripExpert (> 80) but poorly on TripAdvisor (< 75). 6 out of 10 of the hotels (the shaded rows) have nightlife venues with “selective doors”. All 6 have reviews on TripAdvisor that consist of complaints about treatment by bouncers or maitre d’s. In other words, they have all taken a nightclub penalty.
The nightlife penalty is broader than its name suggests. It can apply to any establishment that has ancillary facilities frequented by non-customers, like golf courses, beaches, casinos (“rip off casino“), and so on. Some reviews even penalize hotels on the basis of their experiences at nearby population centers (“the nearby town is terrifying“).
The service penalty
Rejection by a bouncer at a nightclub is just one example of an event that is likely to prompt someone to take the time to log on to TripAdvisor and write a scathing review of a hotel. To investigate what else triggers negative review writing, we read 1,000 one-star reviews. (We selected 100 hotels at random from TripAdvisor’s 447 listings in New York and for each of them read the 10 most recently posted 1-star reviews.) We used TripAdvisor’s own rating categories to classify the reasons that the user awarded the hotel such a low score. These are the results:
Claims of bad service contribute to 1-star reviews more than any other factor. Over 40% of the 1-star reviews that we read included a complaint about the service. Luxury hotels are especially prone to such complaints; for 5-star hotels, the figure increases from 41% to 46%. Almost half of 1-star reviews of luxury hotels complain about service. Frequently, they say the service is rude or arrogant. This review of the St. Regis, one of New York’s great hotels, is like a lot of others we encountered:
Of course, hotels should be penalized for stuffy, unpleasant, and brusque service. But by how much? Is service really more important than the comfort of the rooms or the convenience of the location? A survey of travelers conducted by TripAdvisor suggests that service is actually the least important major factor:
When asked what makes a hotel great, 30 percent of respondents said location is the most important factor, while 29 percent cited comfortable beds, and 24 percent said hotel staff/great service.
This means that there is a mismatch between what is important to travelers and what reviewers write about on TripAdvisor. Bad service (or the perception of bad service) has an effect on a hotel’s rating that is out of proportion with how much people value good service.
This means two things. Most obviously, it means that hotels with bad service will get penalized more than they deserve. But the overrepresentation of negative reviews about service probably also works to the detriment of certain kinds of hotels. The average guest of a no-frills motel has less contact with hotel staff than the average guest of a luxury resort. The motel has fewer staff overall and fewer services that require interaction with staff (no 24-hour concierge, no towel boy at the pool, no spa attendant, etc.) The motel guest is therefore less likely to be brushed the wrong way and end up posting a review complaining about the snootiness or brusqueness of the staff.
Service is important. But it’s only one of many factors that influence how much we enjoy a hotel stay. In negative TripAdvisor reviews, other factors like location and comfort are often not given the attention they deserve. Location, according to the survey the most important contributor to a good hotel, was mentioned in only 17% of the reviews in our 1,000 review sample.
The high expectations penalty
While analyzing 1-star reviews on TripAdvisor, we encountered a lot of guests who were disappointed because their stay did not live up to expectations. Frequently, reviews such as these are posted by people who resent having paid a lot of money. This is not necessarily bad: value for money is obviously something that is important to most travelers, and it’s only fair that expensive hotels are held to a high standard. But people have different tolerances for price, and user ratings make it impossible to filter out the effect of this high expectations penalty. Say that you’re planning a trip of a lifetime — a honeymoon in Rome — and price is no object. If you go with the TripAdvisor #1, you’ll be staying at the Appia Antica Resort. This is what your room will look like:
I’m sure this is a nice enough hotel, and having read all 91 reviews on TripAdvisor, I have no doubt that the staff are very friendly and helpful. You might even find the stickers on the wall above your bed wishing you good night in six different languages to be a quaint touch.
But you won’t be staying in the best hotel in Rome. Not even close. That would be Hotel de Russie, a “neoclassical landmark” (concierge.com) with “exquisite terraced gardens” (Lonely Planet), positioned right on the Spanish Steps. Hotel de Russie ranks #93 on TripAdvisor, so unless you scroll through four pages of results, you won’t even see it. Why does it perform so badly? If you sort reviews so that those with the lowest ratings appear first, you’ll get the answer. Here are the headlines of the first few:
Hotel de Russie
• “E575 for a double room for double use: waaay over-priced”
• “Too expensive, staff too posh, nice garden.”
• “Simply not worth the money”
• “What a joke and a complete disappointment”
• “Overpriced – Laundry list of complaints”
• “waist of money”
• “De Russie is a Disappointment”
Hotel de Russie has been penalized for being expensive and for disappointing guests who expected a better experience given how much they paid and given the hotel’s reputation. As expensive as it is, however, Hotel de Russie is not the 93rd best hotel in Rome. A far better approach to dealing with hotels in different price categories is to isolate price from the review methodology and rank hotels regardless of how expensive they are — and then let users filter based on their budget. We can make our own decisions about how much we are prepared to pay for a particular occasion; those decisions should not be made for us by other users’ notions of what is good value for money.
Fake reviews
No-one knows how many reviews on Yelp and TripAdvisor are fake; some estimates are as high as 40%. We do know that the incentives for restaurant and hotel owners to increase their scores is substantial.
Hotels and restaurants can (and do) game the system by posting fake reviews.
A UC Berkeley study showed that an increase of half a star resulted in a restaurant’s chance of selling-out during prime dining time increasing from 13% to 34%. A Harvard Business School study estimated a 1-star increase improved revenues by between 5-9%.
We also know that it’s easy and cheap to buy fake reviews. Outsourcing websites like Fiverr and cloud workforce platforms like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk have been used by hotels and restaurants to buy fake reviews for as little as 25 cents each.
Can fake reviews be weeded out automatically? TripAdvisor and Yelp talk up their clever algorithms that can supposedly identify suspicious reviews and either delete them or prevent them from having an effect on an establishment’s score. These algorithms will improve over time, especially as the sites apply machine learning techniques to their growing amount of data. But with such strong financial incentives involved, nefarious hotels and restaurants (or their far-removed subcontractors) will correspondingly devote a significant amount of time and money to figure out how to trick the system. Some of the factors that these algorithms take into account are obvious and their effects can be circumvented. For example, extreme reviews attract suspicion, so a hotel that has a 3-star rating can post a lot of 4-star reviews.
If all hotels posted fake reviews at the same rate, the practice might not have a detrimental effect on overall ratings and rankings. But it is likely that some kinds of properties are more prone to do so. This is because the risk to the reputation of a luxury hotel chain like the Four Seasons if it were found posting fake reviews is considerable. But a family-owned boutique would find it comparatively easy to keep the practice under wraps — and even if someone found out, the story would hardly be newsworthy.
Demographics
The people who post reviews on Yelp and TripAdvisor are not demographically representative. Unfortunately, there are no reliable statistics about who contributes to these sites by posting reviews. We do, however, know about their overall user base.
Some groups are overrepresented on review sites, which skews results in ways we don’t yet fully understand.
Compared to the general population, Yelp users are more likely to be female (~54%), much more likely to have attended college or graduate school (~72%), and are much wealthier (~38% have a household income of at least $100,000). Female users of Yelp are apparently more likely than male users to write reviews; combined with the overrepresentation of women in the overall user base, the number of reviews written by women is probably therefore at least 60%.
Do demographic differences such as these make a difference? Although we can’t tell for sure, it’s easy to see how they might. Women, for example, are more health conscious than men (significantly more follow a diet) and are much more likely to be vegetarian or vegan (79 percent of vegans in the US are female). These characteristics probably affect how restaurants that cater to these preferences rank relative to those that do not.
The Cinnamon Snail food truck
Earlier this year, Yelp released a list of the top 100 places to eat in the United States. Coming in at #1 was Da Poke Shack, a casual but undeniably outstanding seafood restaurant in Hawaii. Spend some time with the list, however, and you will notice some curious inclusions. For example, according to Yelp, the best place to eat in New York (and the 4th best in the country) is an organic vegan food truck called “The Cinnamon Snail”. In one of the world’s great culinary hubs, with a total of 86 Michelin stars and a dynamic and inventive food culture, is the best food really being served out of a truck?
Maybe. Or maybe “The Cinnamon Snail” is the beneficiary of a demographic that is overrepresented among Yelp reviewers: cost-conscious 20- and 30-somethings who prefer organic food, who are much more likely than the general public to be vegan, and who like the novelty of discovering a great food truck and sharing the experience with their social network. There may be worse things than a tyranny of vegans. But it is nonetheless a tyranny.
The alternative
Crowdsourced opinions about hotels and restaurants can be useful. If you have the time and patience to read hundreds of reviews posted about a hotel on TripAdvisor, you’ll probably get a good sense of what it is like and whether it is a good match for you. But the point is that most people don’t read every review; instead, they rely on the overall score awarded to the hotel and how it ranks relative to others that they are also considering. It is this approach that is problematic. It is subject to abuse by hotel owners who can post glowing reviews of their own properties and damning reviews of their competitors’. It suffers from a self-selection bias because the people who have the greatest incentives to post reviews are often those who have had some kind of experience that is not relevant or is only marginally relevant to other travelers. It systematically favors certain kinds of establishments over others. And, most importantly, these problems will not be resolved as more and more reviews are posted; they are built into the system.
We launched TripExpert because we think it is an important for people to have an alternative to user reviews. Our data comes from people whose job it is to review hotels: writers for Lonely Planet, Frommer’s, Travel + Leisure, and so on. By aggregating reviews from 20 different publications, we produce a TripExpert Score that accurately tracks hotel quality.
Aggregating expert opinion is not a new idea — Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic have been doing it for movies and TV shows for years — but it has never before been applied to physical establishments like hotels, restaurants, bars, and tourist attractions. We trust professional movie critics to help us decide what films to watch, which is a much more personal and subjective matter.
We now also have a tool for marshalling the expertise of thousands of professional reviewers in making travel plans. — @tripexpert
The Cinnamon Snail food truck