What Percentage of Travelers Are Writing Hotel Reviews?

Abstract

Researchers have been using hotel reviews databases as a source of information, publishing hundreds of papers during the last decade with data from TripAdvisor, Booking.com and similar websites. This paper uses a sample of customers from a universe of guests, but there is no information about the percentage of review writers in relation to number of bookings. However, this issue is relevant in determining the reliability of results and conclusions when using this type of data. We perform an analysis about “participation rates” and “response rates” in these surveys, both on TripAdvisor and on Booking.com for a sample of Spanish hotels, obtaining the first reliable estimates about the percentage of travelers writing reviews. Results show important variations among hotels based on their level of activity on TripAdvisor and the number of reviews in English. The research is also able to identify a relationship between participation rate for each hotel and the average rating obtained in TripAdvisor, which is stronger than the previously assessed relation between the number of reviews and the average rating by Melián, Bulchand-Gidumal, & González López-Valcárcel (Cornell Hosp Q 54: 274–283, 2013).