It may appear to be rather confusing (not least to consumers), but there are many factors which determine a hotel's position on TripAdvisor.
As a result, online reputation management specialist TrustYou teamed up with the Accor Hotels and the Statistical Consulting Unit of LMU Munich to try and paint picture of how changes to one element impacts on another.
The trio examined the following factors:
- Review score (overall score for hotels based on reviews)
- Ranking (ranking/placement on TripAdvisor search results)
- 5-bubble reviews (number of excellent reviews for a hotel)
Examining the data for 407 Accor hotels (225 in Europe, 182 in Asia-Pacific) from October 2013 to November 2014, TrustYou was able to determine the following:
- In Europe, if the percentage of 5-bubble reviews grows by 10%, a property's ranking is improved by 11.3%. A 10% increase in review score pushes a ranking up by 6.1%.
- But, in Asia-Pacific, a 10% jump in 5-bubble reviews will increase the ranking by only 3.7%, with a 10% review score increase seeing a 4.3% improvement in ranking.
How this impacts on the volume of bookings is arguably the most important piece of analysis that hoteliers want to know about.
The data showed that in Europe the percentage of 5-bubble reviews have a greater impact on bookings, whereas in Asia-Pacific the average review score played a larger part.
Interestingly, the effects of average review scores and rankings decrease, with an increase in ranking showing a rise in the number of bookings of 5.2% but after four weeks the impact of bookings falls to 3.5%.
What does this all mean for hoteliers using TripAdvisor has one of their marketing/distribution channels?
Well, TripAdvisor rankings yield more bookings for a hotel's overall web channel. For example, a ranking increase of 10% will see the overall number of bookings climb by 4.6% and 5.7% respectively for Europe and Asia-Pacific.
The same goes for average review scores, with an increase of 10% triggering a rise in the number of overall web bookings by 9% in Europe and a hefty 15% in Asia-Pacific.