Foreign Perspectives

Most of the booking websites provide a mechanism for guests to comment on and score the performance of the accommodation which they’ve used recently.

In most cases the comments are approved by the booking site before they’re published so you only get to see the relatively sensible ones as they weed out those that are from another planet. For example, the commentary that we received a year ago that criticised the “ancient boxy hairdryer” in the bathroom; in fact it was a reasonably modern room heater. Or the couple that wrote quite an extensive critique of their stay that rarely touched base with reality and for which it turned out that all their problems stemmed from them not having changing the time on their watch.

However, as well as the commentary there’s generally a scoring system in place which can sometimes have quite bizzare numerical effects. For example, on one site we’ve the vast majority of scores 7 and over yet because of two 2.5s from a single group we end up with an overall 5. It’s scoring bias like that which makes a nonsense of the scoring. In a large hotel with hundreds of comments one or two low scores disappear of course but when you’ve only a few dozen comments just one disgruntled customer can really throw the overall result.