Will customer ratings for airlines prove as important as those of hotels?

By B.R.

TRIPADVISOR has been a wonderful innovation for anyone booking a hotel. With 350m customer reviews of 6.5m establishments, it has given consumers a meaningful way to judge a hotel’s service and amenities against the price it charges. Because so many of us now book a room based on reviews on such “meta-search” sites, those with poor service are quickly weeded out. And customers have proved discerning. They tend to have a rough idea of how much they are prepared to spend on a night’s accommodation, and a realistic idea of the level of service that might buy (evidenced by the fact that the average hotel rating is around 4 out of 5). Hence they can shop around for the best establishment within their price bracket. In that way, review sites have had a positive effect both on hotels’ cost and their quality.

Compare that with the effect of meta-search on the airline industry. Here, there are no widely used customer reviews. Instead, flights tend merely to be listed in order of price. That encourages flyers to consider only cheapest option, regardless of how much it veers towards the bovine. So airlines have skimped ever more on service, and have tried to cram as many people onto planes as they can, so that they can cut costs and appear as near to the top of the comparison sites as possible.

TripAdvisor is now looking to shake up the airline industry the same way it has hotels, by launching airline reviews. Today it unveiled a revamped service, TripAdvisor Flights, in which customers can grade and review airlines around the world in much the same way that they would a night’s stay somewhere. These reviews are then combined with an external rating of the amenities on a particular route, such as the type of seat offered and whether there are power ports and wi-fi available to flyers, to give it an overall “FlyScore”.

It will take time for TripAdvisor to garner the number of reviews needed to make them truly useful. There are currently, for example, around 2,000 customer ratings for British Airways (with a rating of 3.5 out of 5). However, there are not yet customer ratings of individual flights. That is important because service levels can vary wildly on a single carrier, depending on whether the journey is long- or short-haul, and the specific plane being used to fly it. There is also no option to sort flights by their score, making immediate comparisons between different options difficult. Such advances are on the way though, suggests Bryan Saltzburg of TripAdvisor.

History suggests the firm has a good chance of making an eventual impact. If it does reach its potential, it might just encourage flyers to change their buying behaviour. If customers are willing to pay, say, $30 more for a seat rated as excellent compared with one that is terrible, then maybe airlines will pull out of their race to the bottom. A world in which carriers compete for the quality of the reviews they receive, as well as the price they offer, would be a better one.

That is not a given. There is a difference between the way consumers think about hotels and flights. Hotels are, in the marketing jargon, “horizontally differentiated”. Even when they cost the same, what one person considers important in an establishment—a nice pool, a gym and a state-of-the-art entertainment system, say—will be different from another person’s ideal—a four-poster bed, a fancy cocktail bar and a Michelin Star. That makes customer reviews all the more helpful when it comes to choosing between them. Whether reviews of seat pitch, airline food and cabin crew will prove to be as important to an airline customer’s decision remains to be seen. We can only hope they will.