Yes, and more than most other things a hotel gets wrong. Wi-Fi is one of the three categories that drag a review score down most, the score sets the price a guest will pay, and the complaint is almost never about speed. It is about the first ten minutes: the code that was not on the card, the password that did not work.
By Mark Townsend, founder of Resort Manager Solutions and author of IT in Hospitality.
TrustYou analyses hotel reviews in bulk and works out which categories pull a score up and which pull it down. Its finding on the negative side is short: the strongest score drops come from three categories, price, maintenance and Wi-Fi.
The 2022 figures put numbers on it. Worldwide, across 128 million reviews, the three biggest negative impacts were price at −2.63, Wi-Fi at −2.67 and the room at −1.92. In the Asia-Pacific data, Wi-Fi came second only to the room. A hotel can spend a great deal on beds and bathrooms and still lose more score to the internet than to either.
Source: TrustYou, Impact Scores and How guest reviews impacted hotel performance in 2022. Their numbers, not ours.
Expedia Group studied how travellers choose where to stay and what they will pay for a rating. The relative pricing power ran from a 38% premium at a score of 4.9 to a 45% discount at 2.9, with the crossover just under 4.0. At an equal price, guests in that study were 3.9 times more likely to book the higher-rated property, and a third of them filtered out anything under four stars before comparing at all.
Those are the study’s figures for its sample. The point is the shape: the difference between a 3.9 and a 4.4 is not cosmetic. It is the difference between discounting and charging a premium for the same room.
Source: Expedia Group, The Big Decision: How travelers choose where to stay, as reported by TrustYou.
4.9 · +38%
4.4 · +26%
3.9 · −7%
3.4 · −25%
2.9 · −45%
Expedia Group / TrustYou. Relative to the market, in that study.
Read the Wi-Fi complaints in your own reviews and a pattern appears. Very few say the internet was slow. They say the code on the card did not work, the password on the sign was wrong, the page never loaded, reception was busy, and the guest gave up and used their own data for the rest of the stay. The stay was fine. The review says otherwise, because the first thing the guest tried to do in the room failed.
That friction is small, specific and entirely removable. A guest who checked in an hour ago has already told your front desk who they are. The Wi-Fi can use that. They type their room number and their surname, the sign-in page checks the live in-house list, and they are online. No code, no card, no sign, nothing to get wrong. When they check out, the access ends on its own.
It also takes the password off the chalkboard, which is where it ends up in every hotel that has one: on the sign, in a review, on the phone of somebody parked outside. How the room sign-in works →
Removing the friction stops good stays being reviewed as bad ones. It does not make anyone write a review. Reviews are written by the annoyed unless everybody gets asked, and asking is the job nobody on the front desk wants to do forty times a day.
So the ask is automatic, and it is timed off the real checkout rather than a guess: the front-desk system says the stay has ended, and a few hours later the guest gets one short message under the hotel’s name with a link straight to the review page. Each guest is asked once.
There is a case for asking only the happy ones, and it is worth stating. A hotel that filters gets a better-looking score faster, and the software to do it is easy to build. We have not built it. Sorting guests by their private score and sending only the pleased ones to Google is called review gating; it breaches Google’s and TripAdvisor’s rules, and a score built that way is not the score the data above is measuring. Every guest who responds is offered the same public link. A low score alerts the manager, which is the useful thing to do with it anyway.
1. The front-desk system records the checkout.
2. A few hours later, the timing is yours, the guest gets one message from the hotel.
3. The link goes straight to your listing. One tap.
4. Everyone who responds is offered the same public review link, whatever they scored. A low score alerts your manager.
5. Each guest is asked once.
Yes. TrustYou, which analyses hotel reviews at scale, names Wi-Fi as one of the three categories that drag a hotel’s score down most, alongside price and maintenance. In its 2022 data, Wi-Fi cost more score than the room itself worldwide. The complaint is rarely about speed. It is about getting on.
In Expedia Group’s study of how travellers choose, a property rated 4.9 could price 38% above the market and one rated 2.9 had to discount by 45%. Those are relative pricing figures from that study, not a promise about any property. They show the direction and the size of the effect.
The one that stops them getting on. A code that was not on the card, a password that does not match the sign, a page that will not load. Speed complaints exist, but the review that begins “we could not even connect” is the one that costs a star.
Yes, and only once, a few hours after checkout. Asking only the guests you expect to be happy is review gating, which breaches Google’s and TripAdvisor’s rules. Every guest who responds is offered the same public review link; a low score alerts the manager instead of being hidden.
It removes one of the three biggest reasons a score drops, and it removes the most common small friction reviewers name. It does not by itself add a star. What it does is stop a good stay being reviewed as a bad one because of the first ten minutes.
Then tell us the property and what the Wi-Fi runs on. We will show you the room sign-in on your own phone, against a real guest list.
