Crowdsourced hotel recommendations in search results Hrush
We know that selecting the perfect hotel is key to ensuring that you have a great trip. We also know that it isn’t easy to make decisions about hotels. Over time, we’ve added a number of features to make choosing a hotel easier–we made hotel results available on a map, integrated traveller reviews from TripAdvisor, even enabled sorting search results based on TripAdvisor ratings and many more features and tweaks over time.
We recently got to thinking about how we could give customers even more confidence that they’re making the right choice when evaluating the hotels they see on our search results. We generated a lot of ideas and many of those will be making their way to a hotel search near you soon.
One of those ideas is an idea that we just absolutely love–displaying the percentage of people that booked an individual hotel in our search results. We all know that we trust the actions of our peers more than we trust advertising messages. So, knowing what percentage of customers booked a certain hotel provides comfort that you’re making the right choice.
We’ve added the percentage data directly below the TripAdvisor rating information:
We hope you find this feature useful and we hope it makes selecting a hotel easier. We’ve always felt that picking the perfect hotel shouldn’t be like finding a needle in a haystack and we hope this little piece of additional information makes it easier to find the perfect hotel for your trip.
Excellent addition
@ashwinsid
Is percentage of people buying a hotel really a good criteria for selecting a hotel? IMHO, absolutely not. This metric does not identify the customer satisfaction post-buying, which is practically the only criteria in the hospitality industry. Your metric does not identify if 25% of the people who booked the hotel were satisfied with it or not.
Rajat–we think the percentage of people buying a hotel combined with TripAdvisor ratings and reviews makes for an excellent combination with which to gauge how satisfactory a hotel is likely to be.
Hrush, I’d tend to agree with you on that. But how should a user interpret the following (hypothetical, albeit possible) scenarios:
1. High tripadvisor rating + low % bookings
2. Low tripadvisor rating + high % bookings
Furthermore, if the data points are going to aggregate around tripadvisor ratings then what value the display of percentage bookings?
Not to take anything away from the concept. It’s great to see that Cleartrip tries to bring out such ideas to help consumers. But it seems to me that what users want are not (possibly?) conflicting data sets; rather a single authoritative source of trust.
Rajat–thanks for the feedback. We have a few more ideas that we will be implementing very soon to help users get crowdsourced feedback about a hotel. Stay tuned…
First of all, its great to see you guys working on bringing more trust to hotel searches. I’m not sure how much this statistic by itself will help me, but i think one that will definitely help me is the number and percentage of customers who booked at the hotel for a 2nd and 3rd time.
Ishan–that’s a great suggestion. Thank you, we’ll definitely see what we can do here.
happy to help
i have a totally different concern. i travel a lot for business and did all of the bookings via cleartrip for travel. first i saw that at cleartrip the cost of domestic flights is 200 – 500 higher than say makemytrip. now that is hardly a concern given the convenience of cleartrip design.
so i decided that i will shift my hotel bookings to cleartrip too. i did that with my recent trip to chennai and was surprized to hear from the hotel that they do not accept online bookings. since then i have contacted cleartrip, but never received my refund, so i ended pu paying twice for that hotel.
the other issue is of repeated errors stating that just like humans our servers cause problems – and we are sorry. i mean what is that. atleast in that case monetary transaction has occurred but no tickets.
i coud get a very vague reply to this comment, but i doubt that it can be explained