How online reviews can actually increase a hotel’s revenue per available room (RevPAR)

In a post from August 2015, TravelPulse.com posted about a study on online hotel reviews, and how guests react to hotelier responses:

A joint paper created by Accenture and the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration highlights the importance of online reviews, and how a travel company’s response can affect its reputation among travelers.

The paper, “Thumbs Down…to Thumbs Up,” draws on a variety of worldwide studies to show how travelers and consumers review and purchase.
Per the paper, one Cornell Hospitality Quarterly study in 2014 showed how online reviews can actually increase a hotel’s revenue per available room (RevPAR), one of the industry’s most important performance metrics.

For the study, authors Ines Blal and Michael Sturman obtained TripAdvisor reviews from more than 300 hotels in London over a 13-week period, as well as RevPAR and occupancy data from STR Global for these same hotels. They found that a hotel’s review score increased RevPAR for higher-end hotels, regardless of the number of reviews. On the other hand, a lower-end hotel’s RevPAR generally increased as the number of reviews increased.

Read the full post on Travelpulse.com

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