Noise is the most common complaint in hotel reviews for 20 cities

An analysis of online guest reviews for 5,683 hotels in 20 key tourist destinations reveals that noise is the No. 1 most common complaint by consumers in all but one city. In addition to analyzing reviews for common complaints, ReviewPro also crunched its data to discover the cities with the best overall reputation based on direct feedback from consumers on more than 100 review sites such as TripAdvisor, Booking.com, Jalan and HolidayCheck.

Except from Cape Town in South Africa, noise is among the five worst rated concepts in the remaining 19 cities – garnering more negative mentions than other complaints. Hotel “elevators” were the second-largest source of complaints, followed by negative mentions about “smells”, ReviewPro’s analysis shows. Negative references to air conditioning and heating systems are also worth noting, since they were highlighted in twice as many reviews as Internet issues.

ReviewPro based its findings on an analysis of 2,532,461 consumer reviews published during the prior 12 months for 5,683 hotels in the following cities: Athens, Bangkok, Barcelona, Berlin, Brussels, Cape Town, Dublin, Istanbul, London, Lyon, Madrid, Melbourne, Mexico City, Milan, Moscow, New Delhi, Paris, Rome, Saint Petersburg and Sydney.

According to RJ Friedlander, CEO of ReviewPro, “As a complement to the Global Review Index™, a leading benchmark online reputation score used by Cornell University and thousands of hotels around the world to measure guest satisfaction levels, our sentiment analysis is a highly insightful tool for hoteliers to gain insight into the positive and negative mentions related to guests experiences. This effectively works like a real time focus group and provides unparalleled insight to identify key strengths and areas for improvement that can foster guest satisfaction indexes and revenue.”

Among the best-rated concepts, “modern” is featured in the Top 5 for all 20 cities, closely followed by “location” (17) and “speed of service” (13). Consumers praise hotel service three times as often as they praise hotel views, the analysis shows.

Cities with the top-rated hotels on the Internet

The research by ReviewPro also identified the cities with the best-rated hotels on average according to the Global Review Index™ (GRI), the company’s online reputation score, which calculates the average score received by a hotel or a chain in any given period of time.

Taken into account reviews from the last year, Cape Town tops the rankings with a GRI average of 86%. The rest of the Top 5 are Melbourne, Saint Petersburg, Sydney and, and the bottom of the classification includes London, Rome, New Delhi, Brussels and Paris

The city with the highest number of reviews per hotels among the 20 destinations analyzed by ReviewPro is Sydney, with 838 guest reviews by property, while New Delhi has the lowest ratio with only 125 reviews per hotel.

Average Global Review Index™
for 20 global destinations

City GRI

Cape Town 86%

Melbourne 84.4%

Saint Petersburg 82.9%

Sydney 82.2%

Dublin 81.6%

Athens 81.3%

Barcelona 81%

Berlin 80.7%

Madrid 80.7%

Mexico City 80.1%

Istanbul 79.6%

Moscow 78.9%

Lyon 78.6%

Bangkok 78.4%

Milan 77.8%

London 77.6%

Rome 77.6%

New Delhi 77.3%

Brussels 77.2%

Paris 77.2%