THIS HOTEL WAS SO BAD 🤬!!

Beyond the Stars: What Makes Reviews Persuasive?

Hi all,

It’s been a while! I’ve been busy wrapping up a part of my literature review, which I had set a deadline for before my vacation. Now I’m back!

Naturally, while planning my vacation, I looked at reviews of places to stay and activities to do. And, well, obviously, as someone studying how emotions are conveyed in reviews, I thought: why not make a newsletter post about what influences booking intentions?

My focus is on how emotions are expressed linguistically, and I’ll definitely dive into that in future posts—after all, it’s what I spend my days (and nights!) working on for my PhD.

But first, I thought it would be fun to explore what influences people’s booking intentions when reading reviews!

It’s wild to think that before the internet, people had to rely on word of mouth or travel agents to book a hotel. Imagine going to Valencia without ever having been there and trying to pick a place to stay. Today, I can just open Booking.com or Airbnb, type in the location, and instantly see 50+ options within a 10km radius—filtered by price, rating, and amenities. (By the way, you can filter by more than 20 options!). Funny enough, I just noticed a new feature on Booking.com: did you know you can simply type in what you like, and an AI will automatically filter the results for you?

Now, imagine you've narrowed down your search and you're left with 10 hotel options. At this point, the only real differences between them are how the rooms look and what the reviews say. Now, if you're like me and my fiancée, we go to the hotel just to sleep — so the appearance of the room doesn’t matter too much to us, especially when most hotels just look the same. That leaves us with one key factor: the reviews.

So, how do these reviews influence our final decision?

A study looked into how online reviews affect whether people decide to book a hotel. In this sudy they found that it’s not just the content of the reviews that matter, but also how they’re framed, what they focus on, and whether they include ratings.

Valence😡😁

This one’s intuitive. If most reviews are positive, we’re more likely to book. Interestingly, if the overall tone of all reviews are mixed the order in which they were presented mattered. If the first reviews are negative, it can lower our trust and booking intentions, even if the rest of the reviews are great! So in other words, if the first 3 reviews are bad and the other 7 are great, we will have already been “contaminated” with the bad reviews and the hotel might potentially lose guests. This is called framing.

So yes, first impressions count!

Target🛍️

The study also looked at whether reviews focused on core features (like room size, cleanliness, or amenities) or interpersonal service (like staff friendliness or helpfulness) influence trust. Turns out, reviews about staff and service have a stronger impact.

Why? Because interpersonal experiences feel more personal and emotional. If someone says the room was small but the staff were amazing, you might still book it. But if the room was great and the staff were rude? That’s a dealbreaker. It’s easier to forgive a small room than a bad interaction.

Ratings⭐⭐⭐

We love shortcuts (or, in psychological terms, heuristics). Numerical ratings—like stars—help us make quick decisions. So the authors decided to test how much the stars actually mattered. They found that when reviews included ratings—especially in a positive frame—people were more likely to trust the hotel and book it.

I found these results very interesting because ratings alone did not make a difference. Just seeing the star rating didn’t increase trust or booking intentions. It only worked when the rating was paired with positively framed reviews. In other words, ratings help, but only when the rest of the message is already sending a good signal..

Recap

So, next time you’re scrolling through hotel reviews, pay attention to what comes first, what people are actually talking about, and whether there’s a rating attached. These subtle cues can shape your perception more than you think.

And if you’re a hotel manager reading this: make sure your most recent reviews are positive, because they might just be the deciding factor for your next guest. Also, encourage guests to leave detailed feedback! cleary it is not the stars that matters, it’s the story the guests leave.

Have a great week!