trivago combines in its hotel search besides its own user comments the reviews of multiple sources as for example US based tripadvisor, European holidaycheck or booking portals like expedia or Booking.com. We use this unique validity of our hotel rankings not only for our price comparison portal but publish continuously destination rankings for top European cities that get widely spread in the media.
For you I took a closer look at the top 10 US destinations, for which you can find 3421 hotels within the trivago database. We accumulated the ratings of 366310 user reviews for these hotels, which means an average of 107 reviews per hotel. I do not want to bother you with statistics, so I just tell you that 366.000 data points for ten cities lead to extremely valid results where also little differences can be interpreted. If one of you likes to calculate the 95% significance level for this sample, feel free to post it.
The grades you can see here are based on a scale between 10 and 100 points. Different portals use different scales for their reviews. trivago normalizes them between 10 and 100 to make them comparable. The hotels in Las Vegas lead the table with 77.9 out of 100 points, followed closely by Boston and Washington D.C. with 77.0 and 76.4 out of 100.
The difference to Miami Beach with 69.1 points might not sound not so remarkable, but you have to keep in mind that this is not the mark of a single property but of hundreds of hotels where a lot of effects can be leveled out. If you compare hotels on trivago you will realize that 9 points in the overall rating of a hotel make a huge difference in the perceived quality.
OK some very clever among you might say that this number might more give feedback about the hotel structure within the city than the overall expected quality of hotels in Miami Beach. A reason could be that there a lot more five star hotels in Las Vegas and Miami is more serving the lower market segment.
A deeper look into the data unveils that at least for a comparison between Miami Beach and Las Vegas this is not true. In the next graph you see the overall liking of four star hotels in the different cities. So all effects that occur due to a different structure between high and low class hotels are excluded.
Even so the average ratings are generally 4 points higher for four star hotels than for all hotels, the ranking shows pretty much the same results. Las Vegas is still at the top, Miami four star hotels with a 9 points gap at the bottom of the list. Interesting: San Francisico made a jump from rank 7 to 2 in the four star list. Here it proofs true that the bad results in the overall list is a reflection of the hotel star structure.
San Francisico has significantly more 1-2 star hotels and less 5 star hotels than for example New York City.
What may be an excuse for San Francisco does not hold for Miami Beach. The split between the different hotel star categories is pretty much the same as in Las Vegas. Nevertheless there is one additional difference. A standard hotel room in Las Vegas costs in February (due to the trivago price database) on average 150$, in Miami Beach 284$.
