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Hostelworld Ratings Improvement Worksheet

Hostel Reviews, Booking Engines, and Directories

Josh started this discussion 15 years 11 months ago

Out of 126 hostels in major US cities, only 35 have ratings over 80%, and 38 hostels have ratings of 69% or lower.

As part of the upcoming "hostel reviews" issue of the email newsletter, I've created a spreadsheet that hostels can use to calculate how to bring up their Hostelworld Ratings.

Download the spreadsheet [right-click and choose "save as", otherwise it may open as "read-only"]

A hostel can plug in Hostelworld ratings in the yellow boxes, and then see the overall rating in the orange box. The numbers can be modified to see where improvements have to be made to bring the hostel up to at least 80%. (I think 80% is a good minimum target.)

For example, a hostel with these ratings has an overall rating of 73%:
Character: 70%
Security: 70%
Location: 80%
Staff: 79%
Fun: 68%
Cleanliness: 68%

The way I would do it would be to take a look at the online reviews and analyze what is wrong. Then I would systematically work through ways to improve specific aspects of the hostel.

Management could then enter some new values into the yellow boxes of the spreadsheet and see what needs to be done to bring the hostel up above 80%.

In this case, maybe targets like this could be set:

Character: 83% - creative redecoration, fix the furniture, etc.
Security: 80% - install better lockers, front door security, get rid of shady guests
Location: 80% - leave this one alone for the moment
Staff: 88% - train the staff to be more helpful (see links below)
Fun: 79% - regular planned activities, social arrangement of furniture, icebreakers (cards, board games, hostel instruments)
Cleanliness: 80% - checkup on the cleaners daily

...bringing the hostel's overall rating up to 82%.

Hostel reviews aren't the final measure of how good a hostel is, but they can indicate areas that could be improved, and guests use them when deciding where to book.

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Comments

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aboriginalhostel

15 years

EG is Itowe Gallery (97%) really in a better location than Wombats (91%) and is Generator's (71%) location so much worse?

There are more extreme difference between the Aboriginal (currently 83% location) and Budapest Bubble (97% location), where the distance is no more than 200 meters on the same bloody street! :D

This bothered me for a while, so we did few things couple of months ago (some of that mentioned above) and since that we keep getting average 87-90% ratings for location. I don't think we will ever get 97% because of few advantages they have and we don't, but that rather boosts the already subjective satisfactory factor.

The original post was about how to improve an hostel's review scores. Any effort to improve your business is fantastic but my point is that the same effort could be better spent on other marketing activity. By generating more direct bookings, the issues with these ratings becomes less important.

Well, it's a long "fight" between hostels and HW and still in favor of HW, because of simply ratings and reviews. HW has 1,000,000+ reviews which they proudly advertise and people do want to check the reviews of hostels to know if it's worth to book there or not.

Think about HW as a solution platform... there are reasons why travelers use HW and issues why they don't want to but as long they offer a better solution than others, it will be hard to compete with them. They also have zillions of Euros to spend on marketing, so if you have a million dollar idea how to do it, just let me know! ;)

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Plakian

15 years

Irish guy booked for 4 nights through HW. He eventually stayed 8 nights.

His review "nice relaxing hostel. would recommend staying here if u want to get away from it all."

His rating 76%. When asked about this his comment was that no one would get a 5 out of 5. He thought he was giving us a very good rating.

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Scotch Argus

15 years

We got a review recently wich said "Our first time staying in a Hostel and a great first time experience. Such EXCELLENT value for money and free wifi too wow! This Hostel was finished to a very high standard. We will definitley be using hostels again." - She also left a glowing comment on our facebook page. But she left an 80% rating, which is lower than our average, so it actually drags it down. We have a fair few British people who stay here who tell me it's the best hostel they've been to, but the ratings are in the low 80% range. I think there are plenty of people like your Irishman sho will never leave 100% out of principle (and to a degree I can see their point - they see 100% as being perfect, and is anywhere really perfect?). HW ratings inflattion mean however that anything below 85% is seen as average, 85-90% good, and above 90% excellent.

To be honest I can't understand how any place gets no bad reviews ever - there are always people who'll mark you down even out of maliciousness - it's just the way some people are. I've always assumed that HW removes bad reviews for some hostels. Personally I'd like to be in the above 90% bracket, but I also am prepared to accept negative comments if people have them - it's good customer feedback. (BTW - I've always found Scandinavians to be the ones who give the lowest grades - maybe it's just that we don't offer what they want?)

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Plakian

15 years

I completely agree with you.

I therefore view any average rating over 95% with suspicion.

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AndrewC

15 years

His rating 76%. When asked about this his comment was that no one would get a 5 out of 5. He thought he was giving us a very good rating.

I hate when we get 76%, it's five 4 ratings and one 3 rating. And you're right, often it comes with a very positive comment.

While it's not going to change, I don't think there is enough 'resolution' in the HW rating system. By that I mean it's only possible to rate each category in a multiple of 20%.

That all said, I think Klaus was right when he said the accuracy emerges once the number of reviews builds. We have a rating of 81% at the moment, it's been a hell of a lot of work improving it over the last 12 months, but I'd say it's a pretty accurate indication of where we are at right now.

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MelB

15 years

As a traveler, I use HW exactly as klaus described. I sort by rating, then read the reviews until I find one that suits me. I will also usually look at anything over 80%, or at least the first two or three, even if I like the first one. The comments tell me much more than just the simple rating. I categorize the comments and specifically look at the lowest bracket. It's obvious when someone leaves a bad review simply because they are not experienced in the art of hosteling, or it was a problem on their end, and I know to discount it.

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Gonzalo

15 years

I still believe the rating system can be improved alot... I agree with santa that a big sample of ratings makes certain criteria quite accurate like location, which in my city at least seems to be perfectly graded for each hostel, however other factors like security and character can be a little more subjective. For example security is in my opinion a little bit correlated with location... and location with character and fun for that matter. We are in a far safer location than many hostels so we dont need every single security feature out there, but guests wouldnt know that, but also if they felt perfectly safe walking the sidewalks i assume this should reflect somehow. It depends if they guest rates the hostel in a vacuum or in context. At the same time we are in the middle of the best bars and nightlife so we dont have to make an enormous 'fun' effort and still get pretty good 'fun' ratings thx to location. Anyways, I find that there can be many hostels with the same high rating, say 90%, but among them some objectively are so much better than the others in every way..it must be the 'novice nomad' factor or something, but it doesnt look right.. How would you compare the hw system with the hostelbookers one?

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