Your review score is a revenue number.
It's one of the most studied relationships in hospitality: better-rated properties sell more rooms at higher rates. Here's what decades of research say it's worth — and why small independents gain the most.
more demand for US hotels with one extra Tripadvisor star — plus 9% higher prices.
Lewis & Zervas, 2019better hotel performance for every 1% rise in rating, across 25 studies.
Yang, Park & Hu, 2018higher rates, at the same occupancy, for each extra point on a five-point review scale.
Anderson, Cornell, 2012of Expedia clicks go to the top 10 listings — and review score is one of the sort factors.
Expedia Group, 2023 · platform data
Seen first, chosen more
Booking sites use review scores in their rankings, and the top positions take most of the clicks.
More guests choose you — and pay more to stay
Higher ratings work on both sides of revenue: demand and price. The effect holds across countries and decades.
1Demand
+5% bookingsA 10% rise in review ratings boosted online bookings by more than 5% (Ye, Law, Gu & Chen, 2011).
2Price
+0.85% rateAcross 163 estimates, each 1% higher rating went with 0.851% higher room rates — with the "value" and "room" sub-scores mattering most (Hu, Yang & Park, 2019).
3Revenue per room
up to +1.42%Anderson's Cornell study linked a 1% rise in online reputation to up to 0.89% higher rates, 0.54% higher occupancy and 1.42% higher revenue per available room (2012).
A 1% higher review rating raised sales per room by up to 2.7%; the official star grade didn't raise sales at all (Öğüt & Onur Taş, 2012).
Independent hotels gained more from higher ratings than chains (Lewis & Zervas, 2019) — guests rely on reviews when there's no familiar name.
How booking sites decide who gets seen
Booking.com's default ranking depends on click-through and bookings, which depend partly on review scores. A slipping score means fewer views — before a guest even compares prices.
On Expedia, the top 10 positions take 62% of clicks and review score is a sort factor. A small rise can move a property into the places guests actually look.
The score moves the needle most
In the 25-study meta-analysis, a 1% higher rating mattered far more (0.888%) than a 1% higher review count (0.055%) (Yang, Park & Hu, 2018).
Why guests trust the score
Guests choose between places they've never seen, so reviews do the selling. In a Tripadvisor-commissioned survey, 79% of travellers said they'd choose the higher-rated of two otherwise identical hotels, and 52% would never book one with no reviews (Tripadvisor/Ipsos, 2019).
Most consumers in one survey want a business rated 4 stars or higher, and nearly a third want 4.5 (BrightLocal, 2026 — local businesses generally).
A stronger score lets a property hold its price instead of discounting to win attention.
In Rome, each extra point of review score added 7.5 percentage points of occupancy across 346 hotels (Viglia, Minazzi & Buhalis, 2016).
What +0.3 points is worth to a 10-room guesthouse
A 10-room guesthouse at R1,500 a night and 60% occupancy earns about R3.29 million in room revenue a year. Here's each study's result scaled to a 0.3-point rise — on Booking.com's 10-point scale and Google's 5-point scale, where the same 0.3 is a bigger jump.
| Effect (study) | Booking.com 8.0 → 8.3 | Google 4.3 → 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| Rating rise | 3.75% | 7.0% |
| More bookings (Ye et al.) | ≈1.9% · R62,000 a year | ≈3.5% · R115,000 a year |
| Higher rate, same occupancy (Anderson) | ≈1.7% · R55,000 a year | ≈3.4% · R110,000 a year |
| Revenue per room, upper bound (Anderson) | up to 5.3% · R175,000 a year | up to 9.9% · R325,000 a year |
Illustrative: adjust the rate and occupancy for your property. The rows are alternative estimates of overlapping effects, so don't add them together.
Run the numbers for your propertyManage the score like revenue
Give your review score the same attention as your rate and occupancy. The sub-scores tell you where to look.
- • Watching only the overall score
- • Discounting to make up for a weak score
- • Ignoring the value sub-score
- • Letting reviews go stale
- • Track the score monthly alongside revenue
- • Watch the value and room sub-scores closely
- • Fix the causes behind low sub-scores
- • Keep a steady flow of recent reviews
of travellers would never book a hotel with no reviews at all (Tripadvisor/Ipsos, 2019, commissioned).
One study found online travel agents capture much of the benefit of higher ratings through commission (Neirotti et al., 2016) — another reason to grow direct bookings.
What the research doesn't say
Where the evidence is weaker than a catchy headline would suggest.
Mostly correlation
Lewis & Zervas use a natural experiment to argue cause and effect; most other studies show higher ratings are linked to better performance.
Averages, approximately scaled
The effects are averages, and scaling them to a 0.3-point change is an approximation.
OTAs take a share
Online travel agents capture part of the gain from higher ratings through commission.
Not South African data
The studies use data from the US, Europe and China.
How RoomCheck helps
Every problem caught and fixed during a stay is one less reason for a low score — and because scores feed both bookings and rates, small, sustained gains compound.
RoomCheck helps by making it easy for guests to raise problems while they're still on property, so they can be fixed before checkout. You can test what a small rise might be worth against RoomCheck's subscription in our calculator.
- Problems raised and fixed before checkout
- Fewer reasons for low sub-scores
- Compare the gain with the cost in our calculator
Industry research sources
Revenue research
• Lewis & Zervas (2019). The economic value of online reviews (US hotels, 2005–2014).
• Ye, Law, Gu & Chen (2011). The influence of user-generated content on traveler behavior.
• Anderson, Cornell (2012). The impact of social media on lodging performance.
• Öğüt & Onur Taş (2012). The influence of internet customer reviews on online sales and prices.
• Viglia, Minazzi & Buhalis (2016). The influence of e-word-of-mouth on hotel occupancy rate.
Meta-analyses & studies
• Yang, Park & Hu (2018). Electronic word of mouth and hotel performance: a meta-analysis.
• Hu, Yang & Park (2019). A meta-regression on the effect of online ratings on hotel room rates.
• Kim, Lim & Brymer (2015). Online reviews and hotel performance, International Journal of Hospitality Management.
• Neirotti et al. (2016). Online ratings, OTAs and hotel revenue.
Platform & industry data
• Tripadvisor/Ipsos (2019). Online reviews remain a trusted source when booking trips (commissioned).
• BrightLocal (2026). Local consumer review survey.
• Expedia Group (2023). Travel marketplace visibility guide.
• Expedia (n.d.). How sort order works.
• Booking.com (n.d.). How we work.
More from the research series
The 9 things that hurt guest satisfaction most
The nine biggest guest detractors ranked by damage, what goes wrong at budget vs luxury properties, and the South African evidence.
Warmth beats freebies: what really makes guests feel special
What really delights guests in their own words, why arrival shapes the whole stay, and what B&B guests write about most.
Just ask: the research on raising your review score
How asking every guest added 34% more reviews, how to reply to a bad review, and why replying to everything backfires.
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