Hostel ratings (fake)

I personally doubt that people book one over the other because it has a higher percentage rating - maybe so if everything else is equal (location, price, written reviews).

Probably only Hostelworld knows how many people sort by average rating. I do it a lot though, even though I think the rating numbers are only partially accurate. (IMHO, often 10% off and up to 20% off, because the type of person making the review could be much different from the type of person looking for a bed.)

It doesn't look like the number of reviews exactly relates to the average rating though (see attached screenshot). The lowest rated hostel of the 4 has the 2nd highest number of reviews. It's not even the cheapest. Do the number of reviews relate to the number of Hostelworld bookings or are there other factors? Maybe whether the hostel uses Hostelworld's booking engine on their own website?

The question I'd like owners to answer is.....
What % of guest even leave a review?

HW has a 6 month kill rate- meaning the review avg is only inclusive of the previous 6 months from the current date.

In Australia where Hostels rule!

Looking at Melbourne with 33 choices
1 (Nomads) has 201 the most
2 have approx 150
another has 124
all the rest are below 100 with 21 having fewer than 50.

Sydney has 65 choices
1 (wake up) has 292 reviews
there are 3 others above 100 (131, 114 and 107) the rest have under 100 with 45 having less than 50

Munich has 16 choices
1 (Jaegers) has 522
2 has 283
the rest but 1, have under 50 with a majority having under 20,

My point is if you get 3 ratings a day for 180 days you're at 540.

I think an average 3 ratings a day is fantastic. I can see how it is possible if you are a warehouse hostel (150 + individule beds) but I imagine the ratings would be lower.
We have 45 beds, in the past we have been filled for almost 3 months running and could not get more than 72 reviews in a 6 month period from HW. When I look at some places and see they have 500+ I certainly question it, When you add in the real details such as....
* My original question of what % of guest even bother with a review
*bookings that have 3, 4 or more guest on one booking,(1 review possibility)
* guest that stay that stay 2 to 4 nights , (1 review possibility.)
* return guest rarely use a booking site as they have a direct means of contact ( examples, E-mail, telephone, facebook.) (0 review possibility on HW)
* is HW their only booking site? , no - HB, other 3rd party booking sites, friend referals, walk-ins, direct web site bookings. (0 review possibility on HW)
Taking all these into account well lets just say it's unimaginable to me.

with-out naming names, there is a boutique hostel here in Bkk, taking private rooms into account their max is 32 possible reviews a day IF every booking stays just 1 day and all reviews came from HW and not taking into account the points above. not long ago they had a total of 700+ reviews and maintained an average of 93%.
I run a pretty good ship here but I cannot please everyone- Things happen- any owner would know- 1 example currently on my ratings is how they got ripped off by a taxi on way to airport, blaming it on my staff as the staff helped them hail a taxi, coz of that they accused the staff of ripping them off and of course gave us a bad rating. another gave us a 20% coz I would'nt let them take beer in the dorm room (it's a bug thing here). What I really hate is the ones that give a super low rating with no text as to why. My point is no matter what you do you cannot please everyone.
Currently this Boutique Hostel has almost 400 reviews on HW they have 2 reviews at 60% and 2@66% (3 complained of bedbugs) all the rest 70% -100% ( take into consideration that occupancy city wide here in Bangkok has been around 20% coz of red shirt riots the last 3 months and thier location is just next to where the problem area was.)

What % of guest even leave a review? please a few replies on this question.

Hostel rating (fake)? manipulated? I say yes, but I take it all with a grain of salt. and the long writing above is the basis of my thinking.
Big money and connections - It's the same in anything. Why would it be diff in this Biz?

I truly would like to see HOSTELS ideals on reviews implemented.
let me know if my thing and math is wrong... Thanks
End of Rant.

About 20% of our hostelworld bookings leave reviews - I don't know if this is normal for others or not. The hostels with the largest numbers to my mind are obviously hostels with large numbers of beds, but also ones that use HW as the booking engine on their own website. This means that all of the bookings that go through their own site will be HW bookings, which will mean a lot more reviews that use another method of taking bookings on their website. I do see this as something of an advantage of using HW to take bookings on your site - you end up with more reviews on what is (hopefully!) a trusted site. The HW reviews used to appear on the business reviews on google maps, but now it just has tripadvisor and google user reviews. Not sure why that is.

I do find it hard to imagine that the really large hostels would even bother faking reviews - they get so many that any fake ones would soon get cancelled out. It would only really be of use if you didn't have many genuine reviews, so the fake ones bumped the average up. I've always thought that if you had a lot of fake high reviews, then if you really weren't any good the genuine customers would soon leave bed reviews as they'd feel ripped off.

In Budapest you dont need so many fake reviews, for a good hostel 10% is enough, this is about maximum 20 in 6 month on Hostelworld.
The big big competition force it.
HW and HB could call the publicity to help.
I found a market leader website, which try to make clear the ratings, they changed recently, but not in hostels more in hotels interrested (but the rating system same), I dont want to advertise, but much better than Hostelworld or Hostelbooker. The only bad thing if I see Budapest, I am not sure they could eliminate completly the fake ratings, but they tried and always working on it.