Hostelworld Ratings Improvement Worksheet

[Hostels]

Out of 126 hostels in major US cities, only 35 have ratings over 80%, and 38 hostels have ratings of 69% or lower.

As part of the upcoming "hostel reviews" issue of the email newsletter, I've created a spreadsheet that hostels can use to calculate how to bring up their Hostelworld Ratings.

Download the spreadsheet [right-click and choose "save as", otherwise it may open as "read-only"]

A hostel can plug in Hostelworld ratings in the yellow boxes, and then see the overall rating in the orange box. The numbers can be modified to see where improvements have to be made to bring the hostel up to at least 80%. (I think 80% is a good minimum target.)

For example, a hostel with these ratings has an overall rating of 73%:
Character: 70%
Security: 70%
Location: 80%
Staff: 79%
Fun: 68%
Cleanliness: 68%

The way I would do it would be to take a look at the online reviews and analyze what is wrong. Then I would systematically work through ways to improve specific aspects of the hostel.

Management could then enter some new values into the yellow boxes of the spreadsheet and see what needs to be done to bring the hostel up above 80%.

In this case, maybe targets like this could be set:

Character: 83% - creative redecoration, fix the furniture, etc.
Security: 80% - install better lockers, front door security, get rid of shady guests
Location: 80% - leave this one alone for the moment
Staff: 88% - train the staff to be more helpful (see links below)
Fun: 79% - regular planned activities, social arrangement of furniture, icebreakers (cards, board games, hostel instruments)
Cleanliness: 80% - checkup on the cleaners daily

...bringing the hostel's overall rating up to 82%.

Hostel reviews aren't the final measure of how good a hostel is, but they can indicate areas that could be improved, and guests use them when deciding where to book.

Related posts:

• Hostel Reviews Topics
• A Look at Hostels in the USA

[Hostels]

Ria made an excellent point here about how to take Hostelworld ratings with a grain of salt because an "average" rating by a guest turns out to be a 60% rating:
A Look at Hostels in the USA

[aboriginalhostel]

Location: 80% - leave this one alone for the moment

Why should we?

- Clear, simple, "dumb-proof" directions about how to get there by both walk and public transportation, mentioning checkpoints,

- Clear, aware sign on the building to make sure your guests will find you immediately and won't pass the hostel several times without noticing it,

- A huge, poster size map in the hostel accessible for the guests, showing the neighborhood and points of interests (especially the hostel marked on the map)

[Hostels]

- Clear, simple, "dumb-proof" directions about how to get there by both walk and public transportation, mentioning checkpoints,

- Clear, aware sign on the building to make sure your guests will find you immediately and won't pass the hostel several times without noticing it,

- A huge, poster size map in the hostel accessible for the guests, showing the neighborhood and points of interests (especially the hostel marked on the map)

That's good info for the Hostel Reviews Wiki Page...

[Scotch Argus]

Location, especially for hsotelworld bookings is a difficult one, and is closely related to the fun rating. If you're like us and a bit out of the way, not in a town or city, then hostelworld bookings seem to always be bad for location for us. i think this is because most of the hostelworld bookings we get are from the backpacker market. They sometimes find it to hard to get here by public transport, and can expect nightlife etc. in the area, which there isn't. For other guests who are hillwakers, climbers, or even car tourists, the location here is ideal, but often these custoemrs book direct, and not via hostelworld.

I read one of Paklian's comments about hostelworld in another thread about no-shows who can't get there do to ferrys or buses and it rang true for me. Some bookings on Hostelworld just click and book, and make no attempt to wrok out how they're going to get to the hostel, which is fine if you're central city, but more difficult if your hostel is abit out of the way .

Ratings for security is usually good for us, but we have few of the fancy security measures of city hostels, but then we don't need them due to our location. cCleanliness and friendliness are good. Character, I've never understood what that really means, we score not as well, but our building is a 19th century tradiaitonal building with heaps of character. Or does it mean something else?

[gordo]

ratins are a tricky thing - ever noticed how guests who've had a bad experience rate EVERYTHING down, despite the fact some elements are irrelevant? how would a hostel being dirty make the location any worse?

teh things we struggle with are security and cleanliness - security will be fixed in a couple of weeks when our keycards are installed - and we ARE clean. but the place is OLD. very old. successive owners have spent a grand total of sweet eff all on fixing the place up. so despite the fact that our bathrooms are cleaned 3 times a day, we're a party hostel and the paint is chipping in some areas, the carpet's had bleach spilt on it a few years ago, so people perceive it as being dirty. we're getting there, but its going to take a remodelling of our bathrooms (pricey) before those ratings will jump.

[skibum001]

The problem with the user review systems of current booking engines is two fold.

First, they attempt to apply an objective scale to subjective issues. EG what does 80% location mean? - Is a few kms out of town but next to a train station better than downtown location that is devoid of attractions/cafes/bar? At best, these 'average' scores are only applicable to an individuals circumstances and preferences if that individual is the 'average' for everyone that wrote a review (But as we know, backpackers/flashpackers/weekenders/groups can have very different preferences).

The second issue (and most critical) is that as there is nothing better currently out there, travellers actually use these scores to help decide where to go even when they aren't helpful (which is only discovered AFTER the stay).

I would suggest that the effort spent trying to improve these scores (for the sake of more hostelworld bookings) could be better spent on marketing your business independently of the booking engines. This would have the effect of reducing the importance of booking engine scores (as you don't need to rely on them as much) but increase the scores anyway (as you improve your product & attract customers that better match your product offering).

Which I guess begs the question, what are good ways of marketing your business independent of booking engines?

[santa klaus]

I disagree completely.

Of course they are subjective and no average location rating (a number) can tell anyone how many good bars are near a hostel (it that´s what you are looking for).

The sheer number of reviews gives them a high accuracy though. These average ratings are extremely helpful for travellers and hostel owners alike to compare some aspects of the quality of different hostels. I have never stayed in a hostel which was wildly under- or overrated (maybe my expectations are very average...).

It is completely irrelevant in how subjective a manner guests submit those reviews - because even if they are subjective, all hostels are treated in the same subjective way. This subjectivity reflects the preferences of travellers who use a particular booking engine to look for accomodadion, so the results shown there suit them perfectly. Nothing else matters.

Of course, everything can be improved. Only three of the six things Hostelworld users rate gives you useful information: security, staff and cleanliness. You can´t do much about your location and "fun" depends on the fun your guests have with each other. If it´s a January Sunday with 80% of your rooms empty, there is not much fun to be had. "Character" is a bit vague.

That is why we hand out these forms to our guests. We get enough of them back to get a good picture. It is still much more interesting to read the answers to "what was the best?" and "what could we do better" while the thing on the right only gives you an average number (about many more things than Hostelworld though). All you can do with a number is to compare it to other numbers. We only use the results of that part to compare them with each other between the four of our hostels.

You can try to market your hostel independently from the booking engines, there is nothing wrong with that, but you can´t possibly market anything independently from your guest´s satisfaction. What people hear or read from other travellers will stick to their minds much much better than the best possible marketing.

[skibum001]

G'day Klaus,

I think you are actually agreeing with my second point - travellers do use these reviews to decide where to stay.

Where we disagree is on how useful the ratings really are. As @Ria, @Hostels and others have pointed out, they need to be taken with a grain of salt. This is because of how they measure user ratings.

EG is Itowe Gallery (97%) really in a better location than Wombats (91%) and is Generator's (71%) location so much worse?

The original post was about how to improve an hostel's review scores. Any effort to improve your business is fantastic but my point is that the same effort could be better spent on other marketing activity. By generating more direct bookings, the issues with these ratings becomes less important.

Having stayed at Wombats Munich, I agree with the 90%+ ratings it gets however I have also stayed at many other hostels that were just as good (but different) that rate in the 60%-70% range. :p

[Scotch Argus]

I imagine the isssue of booking engine ratings will run and run. Personally I agree with Skibum on this, if the ratings are so generallised they don't mean a lot. What is the person who rated 40% fun saying - that it has a rocking bar, or a good supply of boardgames. Or 20% character rating. Or 100% location, does that mean the hostel is in central location on a busy road near nightlife, or on a queit road in a peaceful loaction.

Unless the reviews are backed up with a comment telling the reader why they made a certain rating, they don't tell much. I'm happy to take on board all comments, and totally agree you have to keep the customers satisfied , but the ratings with no comments don't give the opportunity to do that. I think the single biggest thing any review hosting site could do would be to make some kind of comment mandatory.

The other thing about any ratings system is that negative comments can damage smaller hostels more than larger -if you get over 200 comments every 6 months then the average will probably win out. If you get 30 or 40, then a few negatives can really bring you down. The reverse is true, but both these cases mean the reviews are unrepresentative. It's certainly a difficult issue to get right.