Comparing Travel Booking Site Reviews

Travel Booking Site Comparisons

When booking travel, and flights in particular, there are many different factors to consider. Whether it be the airline, the airport to fly out of, the time of day to travel (long TSA lines), and much more, one factor that is often overlooked is the booking site. Great UI/UX, customer service, and other factors can greatly improve or worsen travel planning stages.

In the following analysis, I will compare 7 of the top travel booking sites based off of user reviews gathered from Trustpilot.com:

Skiplagged.com

Expedia.com

Kayak.com

Priceline.com

Orbitz.com

Hopper.om

Travelocity.com

How do Reviews (1-5) Distribute Across All Sites?

From the above visual, it is clear that many reviewers either give a 1 or 5 in most cases, and they are mostly 1 stars. This makes sense because those who are often most motivated to write reviews have had poor experiences, or very good ones.

Breakdown by Each Site?

In the two visuals above, it is clear that one site stands above the rest. Skiplagged.com appears to be the only site that is not almost entirely made up of 1-star Reviews, and actually about 75% of reviews collected were 5-star Reviews.

Do the Services Used on the Site Impact the Review?

Many of these sites have multiple capabilities, so I grouped instances that included “Car”, “Cruise”, “Flight”, and “Hotel” in the review content section. Above, we see that reviews involving cruises had the highest average rating at about 2.25 stars, whereas those involving cars and hotels averaged around 1.25 stars each.

DO ALL CAP REVIEWS HAVE DIFFERENT AVERAGE RATING?

Many times, reviewers become very emotional in their review writing and often turn to the good ol’ capitalized words to get a point across. I created a new variable that detects whether or not any words in the review were typed in all caps or not. As it appears from the analysis above, reviews with words in all caps average nearly 0.75 stars less than those that do not contain such words.

Conclusion:

It is apparent that Skiplagged.com is a customer favorite from this sample of 200 reviews by 7 major booking sites on Trustpilot.com. With further sentiment analysis, we could understand the prominent factors that impact each person’s positive or (likely!) negative reviews of their travel booking experience!