How many reviews can anyone possibly read before deciding on a hotel?

Well, a recent TripAdvisor study commissioned by PhoCusWright shows that travelers read at least six to twelve reviews prior to booking.
 
Now imagine as the universe of user reviews grows –  TripAdvisor now boasts more than 150 million reviews and we know that quantity does not necessarily relate to quality – someone has to aggregate and make sense of these reviews and portray them in a fashion easy enough for consumers to understand.
 
Well, that's the code Munich-based TrustYou is cracking with its idea of the meta-review, a summary of a hotel's reputation derived from semantic analysis of reviews across the world, supplemented by a Trustscore that hoteliers can use to help customers make quicker, easier decisions.
 
"What we want to do is develop the alternative to TripAdvisor in the B2B context to help hoteliers and intermediaries," said CEO and co-founder Benjamin Jost (right). "It's like Intel, we never want to sell the computer, we just want to sell the chip."
 
He added, "We know that every reputation system is built on trust and meta-reviews are 100% objective. Our analysis is based purely on algorithms and math, without any agenda.
 
"Plus, with the sheer volume of content that is analyzed, meta-reviews are working with the law of big numbers, meaning that any outlier or small volume of extremely negative reviews is washed out."
 
Jost said the company was taking a bet on the future of reviews. "Users won't want to read reviews, but summary of reviews. There are signs trending towards users being fatigued by reviews, especially on mobile, where time is limited. And a score alone is not enough so we thought something in between – a text and a score – a meta-review.

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