Raveable Blog

We’ve been hard at work in a site-wide refresh to reflect on the feedback we got since our launch early May 2009. We are not done yet and I would love to get your input on the site and any thoughts on how to improve. Also you are welcome to blog about us if you think your readers will find the site useful.

The new update drives the user experience closer to our goal of saving travelers time and making the process of researching hotel quick and easy. We believe, from personal experience, that the process of finding a hotel for the next trip is frustrating and time consuming. Hotel reviews are a great source of information but they are scattered in many sites beside there are thousands of them. Travelers feel obligated to skim through hundreds of lengthy reviews with inconsistent recommendations from one review to another before they make up their mind. Raveable indexes all reviews from top tier hotel reviews sites and analyzes them for what’s good and what’s bad. To give you an example, here is our new scorecard for Bellagio Las Vegas based on 4329 reviews from 6 sources. You can also check the Best Hotel in Las Vegas collection to see the hotel ranking across the city (updated monthly).

The analysis on the scorecard is supported by hundreds of review excerpts that you can browse and check for yourself.

You be the judge. I welcome your feedback and thoughts…

We have been hard at work at adding and improving our at-a-glance features since our launch.

When we started Raveable we wanted to make it easy to differentiate between good hotels and just ok hotels and excellent hotels vs the good ones.  The original design solves this problem in part by providing a series of rankings by hotel, by hotel class and by hotel feature.

If you’re looking for the best hotel in Myrtle Beach the current design makes it easy to quickly identify 3-4 properties you should consider.  For example (image below):

1. The room is ranked #23 while the service is ranked #51 out of 122. This is helpful when you want to compare individual features across properties.
2. The colored boxes represent a rating or score for individual features.  This shields users from naturally trusting a property ranked #1 but with below average quality.  In practice this is helpful in small towns or resort destinations with only a few properties.

These features allow users to analyze hotels with a higher level of precision than ever before.  This level of precision created unintended challenges we wanted to overcome in a new design.

1. We re-learned that people don’t analyze web pages they surf them. (Don’t make me think)
2. The over-use of bright color makes the other information on the page seem unimportant.
3. Too much information and differing amounts of emphasis left people confused about how to interpret the numbers and colors.

Tony Wright co-founded a company that has an app for employee time tracking software . He was an early advocate for solving the problem by removing the amount of information we display to the user.  One of our advisors also found our colored numbers to be difficult to grasp and thought we should remove them.  Our one on one user conversations and analytics data supported this conclusion.

The great challenge in web design is striking the right balance. We have adopted a less is more approach to the page design by removing the rankings and colors that made our initial design more difficult to grasp.  We think it helps to balance usability and information analysis.

The new design for our hotel scorecard goes live a week or so. Let us know what you think of the current design, or share your recommendations for what would make the site more useful.

Surprise hotels in New York City actually have fewer complaints about noise than beach front towns like Santa Monica and Monterey.  The the cities below had the highest percentage of complaints about noise based on comments found inside of online hotel reviews.

Pack your ear plugs – The top 7 noisiest U.S. cities.

7. Honolulu, Hawaii:  So much for the island getaway – 5.4% of hotel reviews in Honolulu contained complaints about room noise.

6. Miami Beach, FL- Apparently the South Beach night life was a bit too much for over 5.8% of travelers.

5.  New York City -NYC – The big apple was #1 in terms of the total number of complaints about room noise.  However, on a per review basis 5.9% of all hotel reviews contained complaints about noise.

4.  San Francisco, CA –Move over NYC, San Fran is the noisiest big city for travelers. Over 6.4% of reviews about hotels in San Francisco contain complaints about room noise. Let the coastal rivalry begin.

3. Anaheim, CA – 6.5% apparently “quiet as a mouse” doesn’t apply to the home of Disney Land.

2.  Monterey, CA – 7.5% – I wonder what John Steinbeck’s Trip Advisor review of a hotel in Cannery Row would have said had he been kept up all night?

1. Santa Monica, CA –7.79% of reviews contained complaints about noise making it the noisiest city in the U.S. for leisure travelers.

It appears that being in a hotel near a beach or the ocean is a bigger threat to peace and quiet than being in a hotel in a major city.  I suppose one explanation could be that skyscrapers can rise above the noise while the smaller hotels located on the beach don’t have that privilege.

Feels great to keep adding new pages to Raveable.com. Right after launch we got consistent feedback that searching for hotels near landmarks or attractions is needed. We agree. In fact, adding hotel collections near attractions was on our roadmap from the get go but your feedback was instrumental in prioritize the work needed to get it out soon. I am excited to see the Raveable team stepping up and delivering our first key feature after beta launch in about 3 weeks! While we have not covered all the attractions we wish to cover, but we are getting there and you should see new collections added every week.

Enough talking about it, let me give you a quick glimpse of what we have just released. Let see one example from Myrtle Beach (one of my favorite places to getaway). You can always see the best hotels in Myrtle Beach, romantic hotels in Myrtle Beach, top 10 hotels in Myrtle Beach …  along with the hotel class collections that I think you might have seen already as it is provided for all cities. Now you can see hotels located near Ripley’s Aquarium or within walking distance to Hard Rock Park. Not just that, we give you a quick quote from a hotel guest review commenting about this key attraction using the millions of reviews we index from all over the internet. Here is quick screen capture showing Harbour Lights Resort hotel which is 0.4 miles away from Hard Rock Park. Notice the quote from reviews shows comments about how close the Hard Rock Park to the hotel. Also we make sure to show Raveable most-known-for ranking score so that you can gauge if the hotel is any good with respect to other hotels in the city.

I hope this would help some of you find hotel near their points of interest. Please send us feedback. You can also keep up with us on twitter (@raveable)

If there is one thing I want the world to know about us, the founders of raveable, is that we are so customer focused to the point of being obsessed! That might explain why we are bugging people on twitter (@raveable) with messages like “would love to get your feedback” and “Tell us what you think”. Imagine getting this kind of tweets from someone who you don’t know asking about a feedback for a site you never heard about or seen before. Before launching our beta, we wandered coffee shops in the Redmond\Seattle area showing people few design concepts on our laptops and asking them to tell us what they like, dislike … now that we are public we gonna be all over twitter, this blog, facebook, myspace and all feedback channels imaginable

One thing I learned is that people always wanted to help. isn’t that amazing?

The feedback we got we talked about at length, prioritized it, and carved sometime for it in our plans. I am not sure what other consumer web sites do but working with customers and building a product that people wanted is a real joy; it is the only way we build software here at raveable.

So if you have a comment or a piece of feedback on how we improve and serve the travel community better, then don’t hesitate to ping us over email or on twitter.

We were having lunch the other day and an interesting discussion came up.  Why does price inherently increase customer satisfaction?

Ratings from hotel reviews increase as hotel class increases

Our database of millions of hotel reviews reports that guests are inherently happier when they stay at a 5-star hotel vs. a 4-star hotel. The same is true for a 4-star hotel vs. a 3-star hotel and so forth.

Is it true that if you spend more money you will be naturally happier with the hotel?  The answer from hotel reviews is yes.

Why do you think hotel guest satisfaction increase as hotel class increases?

Like most people, I love the efficiencies technology creates. The DVR/Tivo, Google and Microsoft Office are obvious examples of time saving technologies.

But I take for granted how much time the elegant display of information saves me.  

Think about how efficient it is to look at GOOG on stock chart and quickly be able to determine if the stock is up or down for the year.  How is it performing in the last month? How does it compare to the S&P 500 etc..?   10 minutes of price history analysis for a specific stock can be summarized in 1 second with a simple line chart.

Unfortunately, information visualization has not kept up with the ever increasing amount of information. I am currently trying to find something beyond a set of chart controls that we can use on our current project.  

I am hopeful that new innovations in information display will come along now that we are not limited to paper. One of my favorite examples of a new type of visualization is the animated map that tracks Wal-Mart’s growth overtime.

Do you know of a product that goes beyond charts, meters and maps?  As they say a picture is worth a thousand words.

The primary way in which travelers determine the quality, service and price range of a hotel is the hotel star rating or diamond rating system.

Yet if I were to ask most people the difference between a four star hotel vs. a three star hotel I’d get an answer like”a four star is nicer and probably costs more”. If I pressed a little harder I might get an answer like a four star has room service or a gym or perhaps conference facilities. Even worse if I reverse the logic and say do three star hotels not have room service or do all four stars have room service most people wouldn’t know.

Mobile and AAA popularized the ratings system in N. America but I can’t blame for ALL of the confusion. The sheer number of variables that can impact a hotel one way or another is daunting. No one wants to read a document describing the quality of the hangers in the closet, or the attire of the front desk staff. So both companies have a long criterion they use as an instrument to ultimately reflect a single rating. The end result is a ratings system built by experts which aims to reflect everything I might care about in a hotel but is inherently flawed.

The problem with experts evaluating things for consumers is that there are too few expert reviews and it is still very subjective. For example, this consultant states that AAA will rate a room with a wall mounted plasma screen LOWER than a room with an out-of-date 25 inch tube sitting in a space infringing armoire! No thanks, I’ll take the plasma and the extra square footage.

Yet, experts aren’t all bad either. The online travel agents seemed to decide that because the hotel ratings system was open to interpretation they would just inflate the ratings from time to time. After all who wouldn’t be lured by the notion of a great hotel at a cheap price? Like all scams they work in the short term but infuriate people in the long term and ultimately ruin the reputation of the business.

Once I look at ratings outside of the U.S. it becomes even a bigger free for all. My favorite example is the hotel Burj Al Arab who decided that they are a 7 star hotel. I am sure it is one of the nicest hotels in the world but is building a new category for your facility the answer. I am sure Donald Trump can’t wait to build a 50 star. Maybe we can move past numbers and go with words like Life Star or try the opposite to attract Star Wars fans with Death Star.

The internet is fixing this problem one review and one traveler at a time. I trust that if 227 people visit the Burj Al Arab and say it is unbelievable and many of them they have stayed at leading hotels around the world I’ll likely believe them.

Maybe the internet will enable the creation standard hotel ratings created by the guest for the guest. Until then I am reading reviews to make sure I get the room with the plasma.