Infographic: How Online Reviews Impact Hotels & B&B’s

Online reviews can make or break a hotel or B&B. Reviews have a huge impact on a hotel's rates, occupancy, and ability to drive new and loyal customers. I compiled statistics from several studies in this post about online reviews and how they impact bookings for hotels, bed & breakfasts, inns, motels, and the rest. I've even wrapped these statistics up into a handy infographic cheat-sheet for you!

Infographic: The Importance of Online Reviews

This infographic was created by analyzing several studies about online reviews. For a breakdown of the studies and their meaning, scroll down below the infographic.

(Feel free to share this infographic on social or embed in your own post. We simply request that you credit Odysys and link to https://odysys.com/ when you do. Thank you.)

Analyzing studies of how online reviews affect hotels:

Improve Your Reviews and You Can Increase Your Rates

There are a couple of studies to support this thought.

This study from Cornell University shows that "if a hotel increases its review scores by 1 point on a 5-point scale (e.g., from 3.3 to 4.3), the hotel can increase its price by 11.2 percent and still maintain the same occupancy or market share."
A study by TrustYou showed that 76% of travelers are willing to pay more for a hotel with higher review scores and more likely to book the hotel with the higher score even when it costs more.

So these findings beg the question, how does one improve their ratings so they can charge more? The answer? Start by responding to all of your reviews.

Reply to All the Reviews

Replying to all of your reviews improves the perception of your property to potential guests.

A recent study by TripAdvisor shows that when management responds to 65% or more of their reviews, the average rating for the property is 4.15. If there's no management response to reviews? The average rating for the property is 3.81.

Shy about replying to reviews? Here's an example of process for responding to reviews that we like.

Yes, Even the Bad Reviews

Consider these findings by PhoCusWright and analyzed by Cvent

87% of survey participants agreed that an appropriate management response to a bad review improved their impression of the hotel
62% agreed that seeing the hotel's response to reviews generally influenced them positively to booking at that hotel
There's some good news about really bad reviews. 64% ignore extreme comments when reading reviews online.

So if you've got one outlandishly bad review out there (that you've responded to appropriately) among a sea of good reviews, then things are probably OK.

Get a bad review? Here are some great tips for responding to negative reviews or there are more tips here

Have a Systematic Process for Getting Reviews

Given that people will ignore an extremely bad review, and that they value responses from management, it stands to reason that your best defense is a good offense. By systematically getting more and more reviews over time, negative reviews will look more and more like extreme anomalies and effectively disappear over time.

A study by PhoCusWright found that hotel guests read 6-12 reviews prior to making a booking online and that
53% of travelers will not book a hotel that does not have reviews
BrightLocal found that 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations
And last but not least - a study by Moz.com found that reviews make up 8.4% of Google's "local" search ranking algorithm. Meaning, more reviews can help improve your search rankings.

So, get together your process for getting more online reviews! Need help? Odysys has created an Innkeeper checklist for getting 5-star reviews. You can download it here.