Steve Kaufer used to spend a lot of time in the early days of TripAdvisor talking about how reviews on the site were generally favourable for hotels.
This was in part to illustrate that if a guest has a poor experience, then a hotel has all the feedback it needs and can attempt to improve its service.
Even over a short space of time, the adage went, hotels could up their game and generally the quality would get better - thus the overall number of positive reviews would outweigh the negative ones.
Whilst many hotels didn't believe this, especially those on the receiving end of a plethora of bad reviews, it did seem to make sense.
Conversely, a majority of reviews being positive could also indicate that, generally, people just like leaving good feedback and simply can't be bothered to the extent of going online and moaning about it when they have a poor experience.
Maybe...
Online reputation management provider Revinate recently teamed up with Colliers International to analyse the sentiment contained in 4.7 million reviews covering more than 4,600 hotels in Europe.
The headline finding is that 63% of all hotel reviews are positive.
The higher the classification of the hotel (star rating), the better the review, too, with 80% positive for five star and 70% for four star.
Interestingly, four countries - Germany, France, Spain and the UK - make up 71% of all reviews, but properties in Greece have the most positive reviews.
The analysis also found that the number of reviews for a property does not necessarily have an impact on the amount of positive feedback.
Sadly, only four cities in Europe (Amsterdam, Edinburgh, Moscow and Brussels) showed an improvement in their share of positive reviews compared to three years ago, with every other city experiencing a decrease.