Hostel ratings (fake)

I visited lot of good hostels and they were about 80-85%. In Budapest I visited the hostels with over 90%++ and much worse than the before mentioned.
On hostelworld it is easy to see the occupation, if for weeks NO OCCUPATION after this quite suspicious when they have 5-6 reviews for only one day. (and the same every day)

I visited lot of good hostels and they were about 80-85%. In Budapest I visited the hostels with over 90%++ and much worse than the before mentioned.

The current hostel ratings systems are often nearly meaningless. An 85% hostel is often a 95% hostel where the guests didn't meet people. I've stayed at many 85% hostels that were extremely clean, well thought out places to stay with great management, but there were no activities or efforts to help guests meet each other.

Other times, an 85% hostel can be a not-so-good hostel (e.g., dirty) where the guests have lots of activities and chances to meet each other.

If you want to take an 85% hostel to 95%, I think you have to:

• make sure guests meet each other and have a good time
• preemptively avoid negative reviews

I'm not saying it's impossible that some people are cheating, only that ratings aren't about facilities as much as about the staff helping guests meet each other and preventing the bad reviews. :)

This method is good

All Hostelworld and Hostelbookers have to do is run an algorithm like that on their data, and the question of whether some ratings are fake is solved. I doubt the booking engines will mention anything about it here though, and I don't know if anything more can be said about the subject here that will change things.

But a guest does not give a hostel a rating such as 86% or 91%!

He/she is usually asked to rate each of several features on a scale which effectively means he has a choice of 20, 40 60, 80 or 100%.

I think the Fun factor is the most variable, and also the one that hostels have the most ability to impove.

Interestingly one of those hostels had a 95% fun rating on HB, and 75% on HW, and a 93% cleanliness on HB and 78% on HW. Perhaps HW customers are more picky than HB? Keep up the good work Euro, you're doing a great job! Obviously the only people that can do anything about cheating (if indeed it is happening) are the booking engines themselves. If it were true that there are large numbers of fake bookings, then the engines are getting good money in deposits from them. One could almost imagine a scenario in a place were a "ratings war" happened amongst many competitive hostels generating significant money in deposits for the booking engines. That is assuming that cheating is indeed taking place - I have no idea if it is or isn't.

My personal opinion is that to get above 93% over a large number of reviews, you must have a fantastic place. Many reviewers we get are reluctant to leave anywhere near 100%. We just got one where he left a very positive comment about how good we were, and the review of 76%. If you get more than a few of these it's very hard to get in the 90% range. I guess that the most important thing is to connect personally with the guest, so they won't leave a bad review as want to do the right thing for you.

Spot on Scotch
great review and still a 76%, I see it here,
I get a few 100% but being a 40 bed hostel I have alot of interaction with my guest-Not just suppling great current money saving info but the free pub crawls that I run personally and insure everyone has a top time. Not so hard to do in Bangkok but rare that hostel owners here do it. Really there are not many Proper Hostels here, mostly now "boutique hostels" that have no real interaction past the front desk.
In the 4+ yrs here I have realized that HW customers ARE more picky, No clue as to why.
I'm always a bit suss when 1 day stayers give 100%. It happens I Know, but not as consistantly as I see some here receive. What gets me is the 1 day stays (some check in late and leave early not talking to anyone) that give a very low rating with no worded responce. If I reveiwed a place and gave a low % I would deff give a reason why. And true enough, in my eyes I see those types of inconsistancies just before or at the start of the high season... Mabey I'm just paranoid? I will say that some Extream reviews(20%) by guest that have not even stayed here have been stricken by HW and HB ( to their credit) once I have proved they were not here or that they had the review system backwards (ie thinking a 1 was good and a 5 bad when in fact it's the other way around.) Huge hassle sometimes.
on another note, some Start a hostel with the plan to sell it in say 2 yrs. with a biz plan like that they will do anything to keep it looking good for the coming buyer.
My best advertising is word of mouth - unbeatable! the last question on our check-in form is "How did you hear about us?" and watching the % of guest who answer "A friend" over 4 yrs has made me feel really good about what I am doing here. Even better for them as they get the uber good treatment.

@ Hostel - would be great if they actually cared enough to implement your Ideal!