The star classification system for hotels in Germany is to be radically overhauled and will now include a mixture of expert opinion and consumer reviews.
A deal struck between the Organisation of German Hotels and Restaurants (DEHOGA) and social media monitoring platform TrustYou [TLabs Showcase - TrustYou] follows a similar move by the sister industry body in Switzerland, Hotellerie Suisse.
The TrustYou system analyses hundreds of review sites, hotel online rating systems and social networks to find the overall consumer rating for a property.
DOHEGA will combine TrustYou’s data with existing professional reviews from writers and hotel pundits to establish a new star rating for each of the accommodation and eating venues included in its database, currently around 240,000.
Helmut Otto of DOHEGA the classification committee says the decision to alter the rating process will give its star rating board a better impression of the “strengths and weaknesses” of each property.
The deal is slated to last for three years and comes after TrustYou entered a similar partnership with the Swiss organisation, part of a European network of hotel industry groups.
Elsewhere in Europe, UK tourist authorities are also withdrawing their support for the long-standing hotel star rating system after claiming user reviews are a better indicator of hotel quality.
Sorry Kevin, but I have to clarify some aspects that might have gone lost during a Google
translation of our German press release…:
1. DEHOGA will not radically overhaul the German Hotel Classification system. We are integral and founding part of the Hotelstars Union (www.hotelstars.eu). The next joint revision of the criteria in Austria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland, is scheduled for 2014.
2. We will use TrustYou’s semantic analytic tools in Germany to inform our auditors before their on-site inspections of the hotels on the weaknesses and the strenghts according to the ugc to provide them on top with the “knowledge” of the web.
3. We consider the existing hotel review sites still too vulnerable to fraud and manipulation for letting them influence the star classifcation. We strongly support the respective initiative of our European umbrella association HOTREC to improve the quality of reviews (www.hotelreviewsites.hotrec.eu)
4. Within our classification we are encouraging hotels to ask their guests for a review on the web by the incentive of additional points to gain within the classification process. We want to increase the total number of reviews to make them more reliable and useful for the quality management of the hotels.
5. Hotel classification in Germany has always been performed by the German Hotel and Restaurant Association (DEHOGA) on its own since its market introduction in 1996. So far, 8,000 out of 21,000 hotels in Germany are participating in our voluntary classification. We never had any discussions about a participation of governmental authorities.
Kind regards from Berlin,
Markus Luthe
CEO of the German Hotel Association
@Markus. Thanks for the remarks. I actually didn’t see a german press release. Info came from trustyou via email.
I am very puzzled about the feasibility of this European Star Unions project …will it really serve the traveler overall? We all know that star rating doesn’t mean anything anymore. Travelers have a much larger choice of accommodation to choose from (B&B, inns, apartments, vacation rentals…). UGC wins all the time vs. fixed star rating criteria.
Cheers from London,
Guillaume
When hotel ratings are based on customer feedbacks, then this should be filtered towards the people that have my profile. Customer feedback is only relevant when the guest that gives feedback has my profile or find the same values important, as then only the recommendation and input is from value.