The most accurate impression - Dialogue or TripAdvisor?

In our opinion there has not yet been enough focus in the press on whether or not review sites give an accurate impression of a business.

Above you will see the ratings for a hotel: first from Dialogue and second from TripAdvisor. So let's look at the differences:

First: the method of harvest. We invite all their guests to post a review; TripAdvisor relies on guests volunteering to post a review. This results in three major statistical impacts:

1. Dialogue ensures a much more representative sample of the hotel's guests actually write a review. In this case 1664 reviews through Dialogue as opposed to 810 on TripAdvisor: double the number of guest opinions
2. Guests often use TripAdvisor to complain without understanding the background to their complaint; Dialogue allowed this hotel to respond* to 202 reviews which contained some form of criticism before then inviting the guest to post their final review
3. Dissatisfied guests are much more likely to post (to TripAdvisor), out of all proportion to the reality of a stay at any given hotel - by a factor of around 15:1. This leads to an inbuilt bias on TripAdvisor which is reflected in the average scores of any hotel

This resulted in the following breakdown of the 1462* final reviews:

• Excellent      783   
• Very Good    614
• Average        61
• Poor              4
• Terrible          0

*All reviews are first read by a HelpHound moderator; those that require input from the hotel are placed in 'Resolution' where the hotel and their guest can discuss whatever point has been raised. at the conclusion of this process HelpHound invites the guest to post their final review.

The conclusion we invite you to draw from this is that Dialogue presents a fairer and more accurate view of the hotel: according to TripAdvisor over 10% of their guests are unhappy (posting a poor/terrible review) - that's one in ten and is demonstrably misleading. With Dialogue every guest is asked their opinion, and any guest who is unhappy enough to want their opinion published has their opinion published. Dialogue enables a well-run and managed hotel to look just that. Dialogue is fair to both hotel and guest alike.