Side by side: a comparison of top hotel rankings
At TripExpert we take an entirely new approach to rating and ranking hotels. Our review data comes not from users, but from professionals.
In an earlier article, we identified the main problem with user reviews of hotels: they are unreliable. Hotels game the system by buying fake reviews. Not everyone takes the time to review their stay, and the people that do post reviews tend to have had an extreme experience. This skews the data because of the prevalence of extremely positive or extremely negative reviews. Often, reviews are not even posted by guests: our research shows that many high-end hotels are unfairly penalized because of 1-star reviews of their ancillary facilities like nightclubs and golf courses.
This article compares TripExpert's #1 hotels with TripAdvisor's.
In this article, we take a look at how the difference between user reviews and expert reviews plays out in several major cities. We compare our top hotel with the #1 ranked hotel on TripAdvisor. Although we think the results speak for themselves, in some cases we'll also spend some time examining why the outcomes are so different — explaining, in other words, how TripAdvisor got it so very wrong.
