For Online Hotel Reviews, The More The Merrier | latimes.com
If you see a hotel with only a handful of online reviews, you might not be getting the full picture.
A study by Spanish professors published by Cornell University found that initial online hotel reviews tend to be more negative and that the overall evaluations improve as the number of opinions increase.
Online reviews are crucial for hotels because research shows they are usually more effective in swaying potential guests than traditional marketing such as print, radio and television ads.
The study, based on sample reviews of 16,680 hotels, found that when a hotel has only 11 to 20 reviews, an average of 23% of them rate the hotel terrible or poor. But when a hotel has more than 101 reviews, only about 13% of them rate the hotel terrible or poor, the study showed.
