Travel Industry

There is a world of travel reviews

What if you could read every travel review, from every travel web site on the internet? What would they say?

At UpTake, we all are avid travelers and we love reading travel magazines, reviews, journals, blogs. So much so that we’ve aggregated millions of reviews and descriptions of travel products from over 5,000 different travel web sites. But trying to read this great outpouring of opinions is like taking a drink from a fire hose. As we built our travel review meta-search engine, we realized we had to train our computers to read the reviews for us and pull out the insights of what people are saying. As we find positive and negative opinions about products and their applicability to certain types of vacations, we also gain many insights into the people who write reviews.

Here are some things we’ve learned

The average travel review author is a 30-something woman with a moderate budget seeking to get away from it all. A travel reviewer is least likely to be a man, schlepping around living out of his backpack while seeking cosmetic improvements. But averages don’t tell the whole story. From teens to centenarians, from thrill seekers to beach bums, people from all walks of life are out there traveling and sharing.

On the whole, travel reviewers are a bright and creative bunch. They write on average 120 words per review. The collective vocabulary of travel reviewers is an astonishing 60,000 words. By comparison, the vocabulary of professionally written reviews and descriptions is only 44,000 words.

The motivation to write stems from a good experience they feel compelled to share. Sixty-five percent of hotels are given a rating of 4, 4.5 or 5 stars. The most common rating is 5 stars. Is this similar to grade inflation in school? The most common phrases in over a billion bytes of data are “I am very likely to return” and “I would recommend this hotel.”

Children are the stars in most reviews

Who are the stars of the reviews? Children, sons and daughters appear most frequently in the reviews, 33% more often than husbands who are the second most mentioned family members. But why are there are 50% more references to husbands than wives? Is it that more wives writes reviews? Gender analysis of review authors says yes, but not by such a wide margin. Perhaps it is when guys write a review they’re more interested in talking about location, price and “drinks served pool-side.”

Faring the worst, of course, are mother-in-laws. Granted, most trips probably don’t involve a mother-in-law, and most mentions of mothers-in-law are positive. But there are some classic gems like this: “the suites are great, complete with a side room to hideaway your mother-in-law.”

Pets get frequent mentions

Beyond family, many travelers love to take their pets. Pets get a lot of mentions and most of the discussion is around whether or not pets were welcome. On the other hand, it seems that one of the best ways to dis’ a place is to make an animal reference. We also learn that travelers are very skilled at discerning various animal smells. Examples:

• “it smelled like a dead and rotting animal”
• “that the first room they put us in had a bad stench of dog urine”
• “literally would not and did not let my dog stay in this unsanitary place!”

Favorite themes to write about are not a surprise: cleanliness, comfort and location lead the list by a wide margin. Again, it’s the positives that outweigh the negatives. References to terms that mean “clean” outnumber words that mean “dirty” by 4 to 1. Location on the other hand is a challenge to understand. Many praise their hotel’s location for being so close to the airport. Many curse it for the same reason.

What may be more surprising is that old fashioned amenities like television inspire way more words (also 4:1) than newer amenities like the internet. Vacations are still about relaxing after all.

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• What 20,000,000 Travel Opinions Tell Us
• How Kayak can beat Tripadvisor in the Hotel Review Market
• Travel Metasearch is done! Long Live TravelMetasearch!

Photo Credits

Earth photo courtesy of woodleywonderworks.

Swimming kids courtesy of whiskymac.

Slobbering dog courtesy of foxypar.