Judging by the millions of reviews left by guests on the Airbnb platform, this “trusted community marketplace” is fulfilling its mission of matching travelers seeking accommodation with hosts who have room to spare remarkably well. Based on our analysis of ratings we collected for over 600, 000 properties listed on Airbnb worldwide, we find that nearly 95% of Airbnb properties boast an average ...

Tripadvisor is a travel website which provides user generated reviews for travel-related content. I used the Tripadvisor dataset available here here. The dataset has a total of 1621956 reviews about 12,773 hotels with an average of 126 reviews for each hotel. Hotel’s information provided includes its name, location, price etc. A review for a hotel includes the author’s location, date, rating an...

TripAdvisor is a website that hosts mostly user generated reviews of hotels and so on of interest to tourists. Should patients seeking fertility treatment get something similar, based on others’ reviews, to help them choose a clinic? A public debate convened by the Progress Educational Trust at London’s Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists in April considered this divisive issue. L...

Firms’ incentives to manufacture biased user reviews impede review usefulness. We examine the differences in reviews for a given hotel between two sites: Expedia.com (only a customer can post a review) and TripAdvisor.com (anyone can post). We argue that the net gains from promotional reviewing are highest for independent hotels with single-unit owners and lowest for branded chain hotels with m...

This paper describes a novel approach for summarising usergenerated reviews for the purpose of explaining recommendations. We demonstrate our approach using TripAdvisor reviews.

User-generated reviews are a key driving force behind some of the leading websites, such as Amazon, TripAdvisor, and Yelp. Yet, the proliferation of user reviews in such sites also poses an information overload challenge: many items, especially popular ones, have a large number of reviews, which cannot all be read by the user. In this work, we propose to extract short practical tips from user r...

Rating is becoming increasingly important for customers, which helps them obtain useful information of products more easily and more efficiently. Normally, a customer rates products from different aspects and then makes an overall rating. According to this human thinking process, we are curious about how ratings in different aspects would influence the final overall ratings. Therefore, we make ...

Until late 2010, Orbitz, like Expedia, only accepted reviews from individuals who had booked their stay at Orbitz.com. Starting in late 2010, Orbitz allowed others to submit hotel reviews, but reviews from verified customers are identified as “Verified” and are given higher weight in calculating the Orbitz Reviewer Score for each property. Here we use only verified reviews from Orbitz. In our s...

User-generated content provides online consumers with a wealth of information. Given the ever-increasing quantity of available content and the lack of quality control applied to this content, there is a clear need to enhance the user experience when it comes to effectively leveraging this vast information source. In this paper, we address these issues in the context of user-generated product re...