Hospitality in the News - 20 February 2020

Your latest instalment of articles and opinions from across the Hospitality sector.

TW: thinkingdifferently

Official Hotel Star Ratings v Online Hotel Reviews – which are best?

As TripAdvisor grew and OTAs established their own consumer led reviews, focus moved away from third party inspected star rating systems which often required payment of a fee to be published in a travel guide. However, the problem with online consumer reviews is two-fold; (a) they are entirely subjective and (b) the proliferation of fake reviews and trolls. The travails of TripAdvisor with fake reviews are well publicised. Companies like Trustpilot have grown to try and plug this confidence gap in the review being given. However, addressing subjectivity is much much harder – one person's ideal hotel stay (e.g. large international brand, all day dining, large swimming pool for the kids etc) may be another's holiday nightmare if they prefer the bijou independent chi-chi boutique hotel with plunge pool and no kids. Both guests might leave a 5 star review. But how often have you been to a place "highly recommended" by friends to realise that your friends actually have very different tastes to you? Recommendations and reviews work well for goods, which are objective – less so for a subjective service, and definitely much less useful for an "experience" which is entirely subjective.

Perhaps in a response to this, the city of Brussels just announced it is re-introducing an official hotel star rating after an 8 year gap. But what really is the difference between 5 Star and 4 Star other than the price? And how often are these ratings updated? The price of a night's stay indicates a level of quality but cannot determine whether the premium you are paying is as a result of the location of the hotel or the quality of the service. Another approach is to adopt the 6 segments used by STR (the number 1 Hotel benchmarking data provider) – luxury, upper upscale, upscale, upper midscale, midscale and economy. But these are also confusing for a consumer. Gen Y and Gen Z live on-line and want up to date reviews. Although some reviews may be fake and one person's idea of a good time is another's worst nightmare, the lack of real time assessment means the travel guide rating system is always going to struggle.

So what's the answer?

The truth is we need both.

We hope there is a TravelTech start-up out there to help provide a simple guide for consumers combining official star ratings with on-line reviews, user generated content and a price point indicator to help each of us choose the perfect hotel for us. #TravelTech