Reviews and ratings on Booking Engines

Well I can understand that asking if the description was accurate is a tough thing to answer, especially if you aren't looking at it. That really shouldn't be a required field.

As for BUG; I will check with the guy who wrote the review program and ask him about making the pros and cons optional fields. I don't think this should be a problem, but it may take a couple of months before it is working.

However I can't change the way that the ratings are broken down. If I did it would seriouly mess up the database and cause inaccurate ratings. Last time I did this - when I moved across from the old system - I lost thousands of reviews (that weren't compatible with the new database structure) and spent over 3500 hours working on the change. I'm not going back to the old system!

Besides the whole reason for these ratings is to break down the ratings so travellers can look for what they like in a hostel. If facilities aren't important - and for many travellers they aren't - then they don't look at this rating, but for those travellers where this is important they can compare this aspect of the hostel against other hostels.

It is good for travellers as it encourages travellers to book the hostel that best suits them.

I also dislike the heading of their text review question: "What did you like about this hostel? " If everyone answers this literally, a lot more positive comments than negative will appear in their 'reviews', which is good for publicity but not for accuracy!

Well Hostelbookers (and Hostelworld) are booking sites first so they will present their reviews in a way that makes the hostels look good. After all that is what they are in business for. They don't want to upset a hostel and lose its business.

BUG and most other review sites (including your site) aren't booking sites, even though we handle bookings on an affiliate basis. By not dealing directly with hostels there is a degree of independence that a booking site doesn't offer. Furthermore we list all hostels whether they offer bookings or not so we don't try to be nice to hostels and it doesn't matter so much if a hostel can not be booked online.

I think if we did our own bookings directly we would lose the travellers' trust, and to be honest I don't think most hostels would want to work with us anyway since they know we will put the traveller ahead of them.

Of the main booking sites, I generally find Hostelbookers much better to work with and I make a LOT more bookings through them than with Hostelworld. However these petty questions must surely annoy travellers. Also Hostelworld don't ask for a review if the booking comes from an affiliate, but Hostelbookers do. That annoys me as I'd like the affiliate relationship to be more like a partnership than competing with our reviews.

Does this mean that if we have a booking engine setup through hostelworld on our site (I guess we're operating as an affilliate?) then customers won't be able to leave reviews on Hostelworld? I try to encourage guests to leave reviews, but maybe most of them can't (the majority of bookings for us come through our site rather than hostelworld).

I'm not exactly sure about their policy on this. It is possible that they may have a different policy for affiliates that are not review sites.

The easiest way for a booking service to piss off an affiliate review site is to compete against their reviews. I worked with HostelWorld since they started but started scaling back once they started offering their own reviews. Hostelbookers reviews are less prominent so I'll stick with them for now, but I would rethink the partnership if their reviews were more prominent on their site.

There is always the option of asking your guests to write their reviews on bug.co.uk :D