The most common words used in 1- and 2-star hotel reviews.

photo of the author Gregg Blanchard

Online reviews. Some hotels live and die by both the good and the bad feedback guests post online. But what happens when you look at the macro trends? What key words come to the surface when you aren’t looking at just 1-2 reviews, but thousands? Here’s what we found.

The Goods
To find our answer we looked at 5,000 1- and 2-star reviews posted online during the last three years for US hotels. We removed common words (“and”, “are”, “on”, etc.), accounted for plurals, and manually filtered out other words that didn’t carry any specific meaning (“like”, “get”, “even”, etc.) and ranked the results by what percentage of all reviews contained each word.

Rank	% of Total	Word(s)
1	43.4%	room(s)
2	34.6%	hotel/motel
3	16.7%	dirty
4	11.3%	bed(s)
5	7.7%	staff
6	7.2%	smell(s)
7	6.8%	front desk
8	6.5%	location
9	6.3%	rude
10	5.2%	smoke/ing
11	4.7%	service
12	4.4%	reservation(s)/
13	4.4%	old
14	4.2%	price(s)
15	4.1%	small
16	4.1%	breakfast
17	3.9%	bathroom(s)
18	3.5%	door(s)
19	3.4%	bug(s)
20	3.2%	people
21	3.2%	floor(s)
22	3.1%	shower
23	2.9%	cheap
24	2.9%	disgusting
25	2.8%	sheet(s)

The result started just as you’d expect with broad complaints about the generic, consistent aspects of a hotel product (the property, the room, and the bed) before getting more and more specific.

What This Means
Sometimes when we publish analyses like this we get people saying, “well, duh, of course more people will complain about a smells than showers.” But the point isn’t to state the obvious, it’s to put actual numbers behind our intuition.

We know, intuitively that breakfast or a smoky room or rude staff or can be deal-breakers, but how do those things compare? Which one shows up more often than the other? And what’s the difference between the two? It’s questions like that where getting specific about common assumptions can become extremely valuable when it comes time to address one of those problems.

Next Week, More
We’ve been publishing new hotel- and resort-marketing insights like this one every week since 2012. Don’t want to miss the next round? Stick your email below.