LAUNCHING HOTEL RATINGS ON OYO
Since the process of booking a hotel requires users to put lot of effort and in-depth research, positive hotel ratings from another customer makes a huge difference in building a nice first impression and are integral in forming opinions. Expectations rise when the intended stay is for a leisure trip or if the booking is made for a group of people with varied interests.
Right from the location of your hotel to the affordability of rooms, from the spotless linens to the hygienic restrooms, from the comfortable AC room to the free Wi-Fi, every factor impacts the overall customer experience. And in order to improve customer experience, OYO has come up with a platform to record transparent feedback about your hotel and its operations. Hotel ratings give our customers the right to know and freedom to choose from an array of fabulous, good and excellent hotels. It is a tool for our partners to understand and identify the areas of improvement, and drive the internal teams towards excellence,
How hotel ratings help users to make an informed decision?
For a potential customer, hotel ratings help in setting the right expectations vis-à-vis the budget — which is an important lever in the decision making. Having a direct impact on hotel bookings, these ratings build confidence that the stay experience will be good, fabulous or simply spectacular. A user is expected to trust another user to verify the authenticity of accommodation and services before booking a stay.
How OYO hotel ratings work?
When a user visits the OYO Mobile App, Mobile or Desktop Website, hotel ratings are displayed alongside all the properties with essential details on the hotel listing page and hotel details page. If the total count of rating is less than 10, then a ‘New’ tag appears on the hotel. Upon clicking on a hotel rating, it expands to show a more detailed review and displays a happiness index (out of 100) on amenities and core promises. Hotel ratings are collected post check-out via mobile app, customer care and emails.
Hotels ratings are also available in sorting and filter options as Highest rated OYOs and Guest Ratings respectively.
Launching Hotel Rating Feature
In hospitality industry Hotel ratings exist across OTAs and Hotel star-ratings is also used to communicate the quality of hotel (5 star being the best). While launching hotel ratings we wanted to ensure that we are able to clearly communicate quality of hotel at the same user should not mix the same with the star rating and while solving for this we came up with two set of experiments.
Experiment 1- A 5 pointer scale is for rating the satisfaction level, 5 being the highest.
Experiment 2- A % happy scale where ratings were shown on a 0–100 scale and 100 being the highest.
Impact of Hotel Rating Feature
We carried out both the experiments and recorded the primary impact of hotel ratings on conversion and revenue per user. Out of the two experiments , experiment with 5 star ratings worked out better for us. Between Control and Test, we also saw improvement in the happiness score and the major reason for this was the shift in After conducting these tests, we can confidently say that Rating version is better than Control version in terms of happiness metric.
Since, the ratings are impacting our conversion, we are happy to enhance the customer experience by helping them to make a clear winning choice and stay at better rated hotels. We all know that first impression is usually the last impression. But when it comes to booking a hotel, one’s check-out impression defines someone else’s check-in impression.
