Every month, 456 million people – about one in every 16 people on earth – visit some tentacle of TripAdvisor.com to plan or assess a trip and at present, more than 200 new posts are uploaded to TripAdvisor every minute. Research firm Oxford Economics found that TripAdvisor’s reviews and scores influenced around $546 billion of travel spending during 2017 – now that’s quite a bit of influence.
On a more granular level, some experts claim that one bad review can result in up to 30 lost reservations. A paper on the influence of online ratings and reviews found that users trust bad ratings more than good ratings. Bad ratings are trustworthy regardless of the number of reviews and good ratings are trustworthy only when they come along with a high number of reviews!