LAUNCHED: all hotel reviews - in one place

If you’ve ever tried to pick a hotel, you know - it might turn into a hassle when the same hotel is rated entirely differently on booking websites. It’s 7 on TripAdvisor, 10 on Booking, and 5 on Google.

It was annoying us, so we decided to put them all in one place & 🚀 just launched RATESCORE 🚀 - the official RatePunk hotel rating.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

It takes ratings from all major websites & calculates the final one, so you know the most accurate one without any research. It pops up in the list of hotels so you can compare them in between, just like this:

WHAT WERE THE CHALLENGES?

It would be good if the biggest problem we faced was being unable to decide on the design. Which we couldn’t (!) because we had too many cute faces. HOWEVER - there were more 👇

INTERFACE. DIFFERENT SYSTEMS & DISPLAY

💡 All booking websites have different ways & systems of showing these ratings.

Google, for example, has a system of 5 maximum points, while most of the others can be rated up to 10. Also, we have to consider not only the overall rating but also how many people rated it. For example, if 1000 reviews on Agoda say the hotel is worth a 9, and 10 reviews on Google say it’s a 2 - we can’t add these up evenly & say that the average rating is 6.

For now, we decided to use the system of WEIGHTED AVERAGE. It counts the average score by taking into account the review count.

✅ AN EXAMPLE:

Booking rating - 9, reviews: 1000.
Google rating - 10, reviews: 100.
Weighed average ~9.1.

💡 Another aspect that we have to take into consideration is the legitimacy of the reviews.

While on Booking, for example, travelers can only leave feedback after completing their stay, it’s entirely different on Google. Anyone can leave any review. Since we’re still looking for the best solution for this one, we’re relying on the above-mentioned weighted average system here, too.

💡 Moreover, we had to make it as simple as possible.

The user had to understand immediately what the feature does & trust the judgment. We couldn’t just show the number without any proof - we wanted to show the rating on every booking website we find, so they know HOW we got that rate. And, again, since they all show it differently, it took a moment (more like a few months) to make it happen.

Of course, although we found solutions for all the issues mentioned above & launched it - it’s still not perfect. YET. Sometimes it just doesn’t pop up on some hotels or loads for ages. However, overall, it seems to be doing all that it should do quite well now.

If you decide to give it a try - let me know your user experience in the comments.