Are users’ ratings on Tripadvisor similar to hotel categories in Europe?

Abstract

European countries do not have the same hotel classification system. Therefore, the criteria and requirements used to assign star ratings to hotels do not concur among the different countries. There have been some criticisms about the way hotel stars are assigned, because the requirements do not necessarily match the quality of service offered. Technical criteria such as infrastructure and room dimensions are taken into account, but users do not perceive them although these have nothing to do with the satisfaction. This study aims to determine whether the hotel category of about 80,000 hotels in 9 different European countries on TripAdvisor is related to customer satisfaction, measured from the point of view of the user ratings on this site. The one-way ANOVA test shows that there are significant differences between the average ratings of the hotel category, except in the classification of 1-star and 2-star hotels from most countries analysed that behave similarly, and 1-star and 3-star hotels from Austria, Greece, Portugal, Spain and UK that are ranked similarly.