As we approach the end of May, thoughts of summer and vacations begin. Naturally, a key component is finding the best place to stay and often that means considering the hotel options at your chosen destination. But what’s the best way to decide? That’s where reading reviews is so important.
And that brings us to the latest blog in the series of taking datasets from ‘less typical’ sources and analyzing them with Oracle Data Visualization. Here, we’ve pulled the reviews from Booking.com as a dataset and visualized it to see how we – the general public – rate the hotels we stay in.
Working with Ismail Syed, pre-sales intern, and Harry Snart, pre-sales consultant, both from Oracle UK, we ran the analysis and created visualizations. We decided to look at the most common words used in both positive and negative reviews, see how long each of them is – and work out which countries are the most discerning when they give their feedback.
So, what are the main irritations when we go away? Conversely – what's making a good impression?
Words of discontent
First, we wanted to combine the most commonly used words in a positive review with those most likely used in a negative review. You can see these in the stacked bar chart below. Interestingly, 'room' and 'staff' both appear in the positive and negative comments list. However, there are far more positive reviews around staff than negative ones, and likewise a lot more negative reviews around the room than positive reviews.
It seems then, across the board, guests find customer service better than the standard of the rooms they receive – implying an effective way to boost client retention would be by starting with improving rooms. In particular the small size of the rooms was complained about, that’s a tough fix, but people were more upset about the standard of the beds, their bathrooms and the toilets, which can be updated a bit more easily.
You’ll also notice 'breakfast' appears prominently in both the positive and negative word clouds – so a more achievable fix could be to start there. A bad breakfast can leave a bad taste, but a good one is obviously remembered.
Who’ll give a good review?
Next, we wanted to see who the most complimentary reviewers were, by nationality. While North Americans, Australians and Kyrgyz (highlighted in green) tend to leave the most favorable reviews, hotels have a harder time impressing those from Madagascar, Nepal and Mali (in red). Europeans sit somewhere in the middle – except for Bosnia and Herzegovina, who like to leave an upbeat review.
Next, we wanted to see who is the most verbose in their feedback – the negative reviewers or the positive reviewers – and which countries leave the longest posts.
Are shorter reviews sweeter?
Overall, negative reviews were slightly longer, but only by a small amount – contrary to the popular belief that we tend to ‘rant’ more when we’re perturbed about something. People from Trinidad and Tobago left the longest good reviews, at an average of 29 words. Those from Belarus, the USA and Canada followed as the wordiest positive reviewers. On the flip side, the Romanians, Swedish, Russians and Germans had a lot to say about their bad experiences – leaving an average of 22 words showing their displeasure.
It's business, but also personal…
Clearly data visualization doesn't necessarily just need to be a tool just for the workplace; you can deploy it to gain an insight into other aspects as well – including helping you prepare for some valuable time off.
If you’re an IT leader your organization and need to enable insights for everyone across business, you should consider a complete, connected and collaborative analytics platform like Oracle Analytics Cloud. Why not find out a bit more and get started for free.
If you simply interested in visual analysis of your own data? Why not see what you can find out by taking a look at our short demo and signing up for an Oracle Data Visualization trial?
Either way, make sure you and your business take a vacation from spreadsheets and discover far more from your data through visualization.
