Thursday 3 October 2013

True or False: A Noisy Hotel Will Upset Guests More Than Bad WiFi

Source: HotelChatter

The answer? TRUE.

We tend to do a lot of griping here about hotel WiFi--the cost of it and the speed of it--but there's another reason why guests may leave a hotel ticked off--noise.

Online hotel reputation management experts, ReviewPro, have found that noise is the most common complaint in online hotel reviews for 20 cities. And you know what? We totally believe it because we've found ourselves using the white noise app on our phone more frequently during hotel stays.

ReviewPro did some serious number crunching and review-site trawling to come up with these findings. They analyzed 2,532,461 consumer reviews published during the prior 12 months for 5,683 hotels in the following cities: Athens, Bangkok, Barcelona, Berlin, Brussels, Cape Town, Dublin, Istanbul, London, Lyon, Madrid, Melbourne, Mexico City, Milan, Moscow, New Delhi, Paris, Rome, Saint Petersburg and Sydney.

Interestingly, Cape Town had the best average online reputation followed by Melbourne and St. Petersburg. London and Rome, however, were below average. Eep. But also, not surprising.

After noise, complaints about elevators and smells ranked 2nd and 3rd. After that, air conditioning and heating systems were also given twice as many negative mentions as WiFi.

That boggles our mind. WiFi didn't even make the list of the top five biggest complaints! Considering that this survey doesn't include U.S. cities, maybe the WiFi situation isn't as dire in international hotels as we previously thought. So long as you stay away from Marriotts then.

In the meantime, maybe more hotels need to follow Premier Inn and install noise meters in their rooms.
[Photo: Graziano88 c/o YouTube]