Hotel Guest Reviews: Focus on Atlanta, GA

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Although Atlanta has a much smaller proportion of Boutique hotels than other US gateway cities, they still account for by far the largest share of guest reviews.

Chicago, IL (PRWEB) June 07, 2012

A few weeks ago Hotel Compete launched the Guest Review Rankings Report. Since then things have already begun to change in the 25 markets that the report covers. To bring these changes to life, and to demonstrate what’s going on in the markets, Hotel Compete will be publishing regular updates that focus on one city. This week the sees the first focus city report – Atlanta, GA.

The Guest Review Rankings Report is different from other Guest Review resources. It would be easy, for example, simply to list all of the hotels in a city by their average review scores (all of the review sites do it, after all). What’s harder is to understand what the numbers mean and what they can tell you about Hotel Performance. To understand that, you must understand review scores at the level of hotel class, and that’s what this report is designed to do.

Detailed information about Atlanta can be accessed through the Online Guest Review Rankings Report. But in the meantime, here are a few things that stood out from the recent guest review activity for Atlanta Hotels:

Atlanta Movers and Shakers

The biggest jump in city rankings in the last two weeks fell to the Holiday Inn Atlanta-Downtown World Congress Center. Its 32 new reviews moved it 31 places up the city rankings – an impressive improvement!

The Hotel Sierra Alpharetta is a great example of a hotel that out-performs its hotel class. With 42 new reviews and a rating score of 8.5/10 it is currently the highest-ranking select service hotel in the Atlanta area, and the third-highest ranking hotel overall. Guests seem to love it!

Another high-flying limited service hotel, the Wingate Atlanta Buckhead dropped from 3rd to 7th in the city rankings. Despite adding 45 reviews in the last two weeks – one of the highest totals of all hotels – to bring its current total to an impressive 725, the average score slipped from 8.5 to 8.25, causing the hotel to drop a few places.

Changes since last week:

Following feedback from current subscribers, Hotel Compete added more than 1,000 hotels to the online report, adding one new market: St Petersburg, FL, and broadening the definitions to increase the coverage of hotels in existing markets.

In Atlanta, an interesting thing happened with Review Volumes: Limited service hotels attracted 20% more reviews in the previous week than their full-service counterparts. This is curious – the average full-service hotel has more than double the review volume (486 vs 209 per hotel) across the major review channels.

Did you know?

Of all US gateway cities, Atlanta has one of the highest concentrations of branded hotels. But despite this, it is the unbranded Georgian Terrace in Midtown that has by far the largest number of current reviews on all major sites, with 1,343 – almost 30% more than the next highest-ranking hotel.

Boutiques – although a much smaller proportion of the overall market compared to other US gateway cities – still have by far the largest share of guest reviews – averaging 553 per hotel, and had the largest average weekly gains, at 31 reviews per hotel.

Full details of Atlanta and 25 other major US hotel markets are available in the Online Guest Review Rankings Report. If you’d like receive regular updates (every two weeks) then join the Hotel Compete Mailing List.

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