Google is taking share from Booking.com when it comes to who generates the most hotel reviews, according to a study.
The Shiji Reviewpro Guest Experience Benchmark for the second quarter of 2023 revealed that Booking.com generated more than 39% of hotel reviews over the period but lost ground year-over-year while Google, with 32%, increased its share. Tripadvisor occupied the third-highest market share, at 10%, while Expedia represented only 5% of total reviews, a loss of 5.1 points since Q2 2021.
The study, which analyzes more than 3 million reviews and 9 million review comments for 9,500 hotels globally in 53 review sources and online travel agencies, also revealed that review volume increased by approximately 20% in the quarter.
The Asia Pacific region showed the highest growth rate in review volume at almost 71%, but overall volumes remain down about 8% on pre-pandemic levels.
Google also came out on top with the highest Source Index, which is an analysis of reviews from a particular source based on positive/negative sentiment and other attributes.
While Google’s score was 86%, Booking achieved the lowest Source Index at 83%. While Trip.com and Ctrip achieved higher Source Indexes, their share of reviews was relatively low at about 3% and 2%, respectively.
Despite their tiny share, the Chinese online travel brands saw huge volume increases with Ctrip increasing its volume almost fivefold and Trip.com increasing volume by more than 250%.
A semantic analysis of review comments revealed that 76% were positive and 24% negative with Ctrip reviews seeing the highest ratio of positive comments compared with Booking, which had the highest ratio of negative comments.
Room category had the highest negative impact on the Global Review Index score, the online reputation score, followed by cleanliness while the experience category had the highest positive impact followed by staff.
The benchmark also revealed that hoteliers responded to 62% of respondable reviews, up almost four percentage points year-over-year. The response rate for positive reviews was almost 64% and took 3.5 days while the response rate for negative reviews was 53.5% and took 4.3 days.
Middle East hoteliers responded to the most reviews followed by their African counterparts while North America hoteliers had the lowest response rate.
Small steps, big results
Overall, the Global Review Index (GRI) was up by one percentage point year-over-year to 85.5%, but that is still down compared with Q2 of 2019 when the score was 86.4%.
The report said: “Given higher staffing levels and abundant amenities, perhaps it’s no surprise that 5-star hotels earned the highest GRI (89.8%) of the three star segments, followed by 4-star hotels (85.7%) and 3-star hotels (82.1%). Four and 5-star hotels also showed the strongest recovery, both increasing the GRI by 1.2 points over Q2 2022, with 5-star hotels falling just short of the 90th percentile. The GRI for 3-star hotels increased by 0.8 points.”
Shiji highlights that a one point increase in the GRI leads to a 1.42% increase in revenue per available room. The company also flags a number of ways to improve reputation, including bringing in automation to help with labor shortages.
“The objective now is to conceal staffing issues so that guests are unaffected," the report said. "One of the most effective ways? Help guests help themselves with self-serve apps like mobile check-in, keyless entry and digital food ordering.”
It also advocates improving the payment experience because there were 25,000 negative review comments around “payment” in Q2 and 15,000 negative comments around “bill.”
The report said: "The mishandling of payments is hurting hotel reputation. A modern, centralized payment solution integrated with the PMS and POS will help hotels prevent issues and provide guests with a seamless payment experience across the property."