FlipKey

We have previously highlighted survey based research which illustrated the exceptionally positive opinions consumers have with regard to their vacation rental experience.  We recently tested these findings against some real data. Specifically, we randomly selected 3,000 reviews collected by FlipKey and analyzed the distribution of the guests’ ratings.

The analysis took into account the distribution of how vacation rental guests have responded to the following rating scale:

As the chart below illustrates, consumers love the vacation rental experience.  Managers are often worried about “what happens when someone leaves a negative review”, but we found these instances are few and far between.   Specifically, 84% of guests recommended the home they stayed in, 12% had a neutral experience with only 4% of guests indicating they had a negative experience.

These findings are nearly identical to the historical survey-based findings we have cited in the past. What’s important to understand is that the above graph represents the ‘actual distribution of vacation rental reviews’. However, the only way to acquire the normal distribution of guest reviews is by inviting all of your guests to leave a review. If you require guests to self navigate to your site to leave a review, you are only going to attract the extremes (i.e. a select number of extremely happy guests and extremely upset guests).

To ensure you are fairly represented and yield the most from your guest’s positive comments, the FlipKey system is designed to invite all of your guests to leave reviews, so you can effectively attract new guests, at higher nightly rates, based on all the strong recommendations of your past customers.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 13th, 2008 at 9:13 am and is filed under Market Statistics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.