Almost half of the hotel star ratings shown on TripAdvisor were wrong: Hensens, Struwig and Dayan in Research in Hospitality Management (2011)

Hensens, Struwig and Dayan (2011, Research in Hospitality Management) compared the conventional star ratings that TripAdvisor displayed for hotels in 11 international destinations with the official databases of the rating bodies. In both samples, 48 per cent of hotels were misrepresented, with no evidence of a positive or negative direction, and the official databases proved hard to find. The authors conclude that TripAdvisor offers marketing and tourism opportunities that outweigh those of conventional rating systems.

Do social media platforms display the conventional, inspector-based hotel ratings of the hotels they list correctly?

The question matters because travellers increasingly meet a hotel's official rating through a platform rather than through the rating body itself.

• Provides early empirical evidence on the information quality of institutional quality signals once they are carried by a social media platform.
• Shows that the platform becomes the dominant point of access to rating information, since the official databases were difficult to retrieve while TripAdvisor appeared first.
• Frames conventional rating systems and guest-review platforms as competing sources of quality information for destinations and hotels.

• 48 per cent of hotels in both samples were misrepresented on TripAdvisor with respect to their conventional rating.
• The inaccuracy showed no evidence of a positive or negative bias.
• Inaccuracies appeared where rating is not obligatory by law, leaving room for hotels to state their own rating.
• The databases of conventional rating systems were difficult to find.

Research in Hospitality Management is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by NISC together with Routledge, supported by the Academy of International Hospitality Research at NHL Stenden University of Applied Sciences. It is indexed in Scopus and DOAJ, and its article charges are sponsored, so authors and readers access it free.

The article appeared in Volume 1, Issue 1, the journal's opening issue.

• Rating bodies can make their databases easy to find and machine readable, so platforms display official ratings correctly.
• Hotels can check how their official rating appears on review platforms.
• Destinations can treat platform data as a primary channel through which visitors meet quality information.

hotel ratings, hotel classification, star ratings, TripAdvisor, social media, guest reviews, online reviews, information accuracy, hospitality marketing, tourism marketing, rating systems

Hensens, W., Struwig, M., & Dayan, O. (2011). Do social media display correct conventional hotel ratings? Research in Hospitality Management, 1(1), 9–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/22243534.2011.11828270

@article{Hensens2011,
  author  = {Hensens, Wouter and Struwig, Miemie and Dayan, Oren},
  title   = {Do Social Media Display Correct Conventional Hotel Ratings?},
  journal = {Research in Hospitality Management},
  year    = {2011},
  volume  = {1},
  number  = {1},
  pages   = {9--17},
  doi     = {10.1080/22243534.2011.11828270}
}

• Article (DOI)
• Journal
• Author profile, Oren Dayan on ResearchGate

Hensens, W., Struwig, M., & Dayan, O. (2011). Do social media display correct conventional hotel ratings? Research in Hospitality Management, 1(1), 9–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/22243534.2011.11828270

Kim, W. G., & Park, S. A. (2017). Social media review rating versus traditional customer satisfaction: Which one has more incremental predictive power in explaining hotel performance? International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 29(2), 784–802. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJCHM-11-2015-0627

• Are the star ratings on TripAdvisor accurate? What a study of 11 destinations found
• Official hotel classification versus online reviews: two competing sources of quality information
• When platforms carry official quality signals: information quality on review sites