Short Facts
- The Global Review Score™ summarizes hundreds or thousands of reviews/opinions
- Hundreds of review portals, blogs & forums are taken into account
- Meaningful weighting based on source & time of review
- Protection against manipulate statistical outliers
The TrustYou Seal
The TrustYou Seal summarizes all reviews and opinions voiced about a hotel in one meaningful, independent number. Hundreds or thousands of scores from many different sources are considered. Statistical algorithms ensure that information from different points in time and expressed in different rating systems gets normalized to form a representative weighed average.
How is the Global Review Score™ calculated?
Each hotel is reviewed by hundreds of people (reviews) on different websites (sources). Each reviewer scores the hotel (review score) on different scales e.g. on Tripadvisor on a scale of 1 – 5 and on Booking.com on a scale of 1 – 10. Each source has its own calculation how to derive to an overall score (source score). The reviews are posted 365 days a year. Therefore each review contains a time stamp. The first challenge is to normalize the different scores on these different scales to one global scale (at TrustYou we normalize to either 1 – 100 or 1 – 5). That gives us the opportunity to sum up the scores from different websites. An average calculation of all source scores would be simple enough but wouldn’t present the global quality perception in the right way.
We do take into account the time each review was posted. Therefore we can guarantee that older reviews do not have an equal weight in the scoring as newer reviews. This makes perfect sense as we all read the most recent reviews first and we all agree that something might change over time in a hotel – that is why reviews are so great, they give us a sense of what happens during a year and not only once. The more of these “test points” we have the better. We also take into account the number of reviews from a source. If a source as 500 reviews, those reviews should have more weight than 5 reviews from another source. These two factors, time of reviews and the review itself and therefore the amount of reviews are the basis for calculating the TrustYou Global Review Score. Again it is a mathematical law of large numbers that the more reviews we take into account for calculation the better we can represent the average perception of all reviewers.