How TripAdvisor Rank your Property?
Below is a helpful article from one of my industry partners, Frontdesk Anywhere, helping us to understand how the TripAdvisor Rank works and how they arrive at the ranking they award you for your property.
The key thing for me is that good hospitality is always at the core. Good scores rank you well, end of story (85% of your rank is attributed to a high average review rating). To achieve this you must look after your guests in the first place. After you’ve taken care of that, then the question, what strategies can you employ to encourage your guests to complete a review? A positive one!
Enjoy the article.
Demystifying TripAdvisor’s Ranking system
TripAdvisor has become the first port of call for many travellers when choosing where to stay and what to do once they’ve arrived in a new city. TripAdvisor was one of the first companies to take advantage of crowd-sourced or user-generated content. Since its birth in 2000, many sites like Yelp have imitated this model with great success but TripAdvisor’s first mover advantage means it is the go-to site for travellers as not only does it rank properties based on user reviews, it also allows members to engage in forums on every topic you can imagine. The elusive 5-star review can turn the fortunes of a property around. But how does one get this elusive ranking? Well, TripAdvisor’s Popularity Index algorithm is based on three key ingredients:
- the quality
- the quantity
- the recency of reviews
Trip Advisor are adamant that their scores are reflective of their users views and opinions and they “take content integrity very seriously and screen every review. If you are caught breaking our guidelines, it can take a big hit on your popularity ranking.” in short, don’t try and cheat the system as you’ll get caught!
But, TripAdvisor doesn’t advertise all the elements of the Popularity Index algorithm. It also doesn’t let us know the weighting of each factor. For example, it doesn’t tell us whether a property’s average review score or whether the total number of reviews are more important.
We decided to do a little digging: What exactly affects your TripAdvisor score?
I’m not going to lie, the results of our research aren’t entirely conclusive, but they will give you a better idea of how the Popularity Index works. What we found was that:
1 extra point on average review score will, on average, increase Popularity Index rank by 321 places.
1 extra review will increase Popularity Index rank 1.5 places.
What that means for you
When calculating ranking, TripAdvisor weights a property’s average review score 20,000 times more than its total number of reviews. So, if your average review score stayed the same and you only increased the volume of reviews, it would take 2,1400 reviews to increase your rank by the same amount as one average review point.
Revinate.com carried out a study last year and based on their data in the Bangkok market, came up with a rough approximation of weighting: From what we can tell, the average review score of a property counts for 85% of the Popularity Index ranking.
The total volume of reviews counts for 6% of the property’s ranking.
9% is left unexplained.