Review Volume

Every year, Revinate publishes a Hotel Reputation Benchmark Report to provide the industry with actionable and comparative insights from hotels around the world. We analyzed over 147,000 hotels in 200+ countries from Revinate Guest Feedback customers so we can provide a unique review on a unique year.

Below is a snapshot of the Section 2, Review Volume

You can download the full 2020 Reputation Report for free here.

It’s no surprise that with a global pandemic and affected travel plans that review volume would significantly decline. Globally, Revinate Guest Feedback customers saw a 52.8% decline in review volume in 2020. The silver lining is that all hotels in the market were likely equally impacted. Therefore it would be expected that your competitive set likely also saw a similar drop in reviews.

With total volume of reviews dropping, it’s important for hoteliers to recognize that each review has become increasingly important. Many review sites and OTA algorithms take into account both recency and volume of reviews to determine ranking. This means that less volume can increase the volatility of your ranking–both positively and negatively.

As travel rebounds, it will be even more important to drive fresh online reviews to ensure your hotel’s visibility in rankings, and that guests can find relevant, pandemic-era reviews.

Revinate Guest Feedback can help improve your guest experience and boost online rankings with consolidated reputation management, guest surveys, and best-in-class reporting. Hotels using Revinate see a 15% increase in ranking and 409% increase in new review volume on TripAdvisor.

Total Reviews

New review volume growth has been slowing in the last few years. In our previous benchmark report, we showed that 2017 saw 27% growth and 2018 slowed to just 8%. While volume has been slowly decreasing over the years, it’s never contracted before—until 2020.

Revinate Guest Feedback customers recorded just 50M reviews published in 2020 compared to 106M in 2019. Driving factors behind the decrease can be attributed to postponed, cancelled stays, and less willingness to provide a review during the pandemic.

As travel rebounds and travelers think about going on vacation again, guests will undoubtedly turn to online reviews to understand whether previous guests felt safe and catered to during their travel research. Hoteliers should therefore continue to encourage guests to share their experiences online.

Reviews Per Month

Revinate Guest Feedback customers saw a 52.2% decline in average reviews per month across all regions. The average dropped from 60.7 reviews per hotel in 2019 down to just 29 in 2020.

With fewer reviews coming in each month, it’s likely that older reviews are front and center on review sites and OTAs. It’s always important to regularly visit your listing to see what reviews a prospective guest may see. 

If the reviews are outdated and contain, for example, information about Covid-19 experiences that are no longer accurate, make sure you write a response that includes the current information about your hotel and what today’s experience would be. Your prospective guests are reading reviews to understand what to expect when they visit.

Download the full Marketing Reputation Report today to get the actionable insights you need to improve your hotel’s online reputation and benchmark your success. We cover 5 topics including year in review, review volume, site distribution, review ratings, and response rate.