Trends Q: Is there any correlation between Facebook fan counts and hotel star ratings?

Though many formats exist, the 1.0-5.0 star ratings for hotel quality, service, and amenities have become ubiquitous for OTAs. They’ve even used them in their marketing with taglines like “4-star hotels at 2-star prices.” But within the social sphere where a like means so many things, is there any correlation between fan counts and star ratings?

The Goods
To find our answer we looked at over 10,000 hotel Facebook fan pages. We then grouped the hotels by the star ratings typically used on most U.S. OTAs and found the average Facebook fan count of each group. Hotels with 1.0 and 1.5 star ratings were few and far between on Facebook, but here’s how the rest shook out.

To be more specific, 5-star hotels averaged 19,500 fans, 4-star hotels averaged 9,400, 3-star hotels were at 1,300, with hotels at 2.0 stars averaging just 200 fans.

What This Means
What was most interesting to us was that the difference in average fan count between an _.0 rating to an _.5 (i.e., 3.0 vs 3.5) rating was an impressive 84%, but the difference in average fan count between _.5 to the next even _.0 rating above it (i.e., 3.5 vs 4.0) was a whopping 175%.

There’s not enough here to read too deeply, but it does appear that whatever the case – niche, total rooms, location, rating criteria, etc. – higher rated hotels tend to have more fans: especially when that rating is a round number.

More and Merrier
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