Report reveals that while hospitality rebounded in 2022, guest satisfaction continued to decline.
Barcelona, 23 February, 2023: The global hospitality technology innovator Shiji just released the Global Hotel Review Benchmark Report for 2022. 6.1 million guest reviews across five global regions were analysed to create a unique glimpse into the state of guest satisfaction in 2022.
The report highlights that throughout 2022 guest satisfaction has been in continuous decline. This poses both an opportunity for hoteliers that address this critical issue and a threat to those who do not take action. The report also highlights that increased ADR and occupancy rates in 2022 alongside labour shortages is impacting guest satisfaction. The hotels that do not address this, risk needing to lower rates to remain competitive in the eyes of consumers.
“We are excited to announce that we are making this data available at no cost to hoteliers worldwide who want to gain insights and compare their guest review and guest experience metrics. We believe that guest experience is the foundation of hospitality, and this report emphasizes that it is an area where hoteliers must strive for improvement, regardless of their star rating or geographic location.”says Michael Kessler, the CEO of Shiji Guest Solutions,
“This report not only sheds light on the challenge but also provides hoteliers with valuable takeaways for success. By leveraging data-driven insights to guide their operations, we are confident that hoteliers will see a positive trend in their guest experience metrics in the future.”
The data is compared against 2021 and 2019 in order to understand global hotel review recovery patterns. Hoteliers are able to set benchmarks on a global and regional level against metrics such as the Global Review Index™ (a guest experience benchmark), review volume, review distribution, department indexes, management response rates, and semantic analysis.
Main global findings include:
- Guest satisfaction, measured by the Global Review Index™(GRI), continues to decline. In 2022, the GRI™ for the global data set was 84.3%, 1.7 points lower than in 2019 and 0.5 points lower than in 2021.
- Review volume has gone some way to recover in 2022 over 2021 but is still lagging compared to 2019 levels. Global review volume grew by 20.3% from 2021 to 2022 but was 29.3% below 2019.
- Booking.com has dominated the review source landscape yet represents the most negative sentiment in the guest reviews it generates. Booking.com accounted for 41.8% of global review volume in 2022, an increase of 12.9 points over 2019, but generated a higher proportion of negative mentions.
- Hoteliers are responding to more reviews than ever but response time and strategy can be improved. Hotels within the global data set responded to an average of 61.9% of reviews in 2022, an increase of 6.0 points over 2019 and 3.1 points over 2021. The response time was an average of five days.
- Most negative sentiment comes from Value and Rooms. Both categories had more than a full point loss over the year. Possibly coming from high occupancy rates (no or fewer upgrades) and increased ADR (lower perceived value).
- Experience, Staff, and Service continued to drive positive guest mentions. The Experience category (+0.9) had the highest positive impact on the Global Review Index™.
The report was drawn on over 6.1 million guest reviews, including more than 20 million mentions in review comments, along with almost four million management responses.
To read the entire report, please download it here.
The Q1, Q2, and Q3 2022 reports can be found here.
