Do Online Reviews Truly Represent the Writer’s Experience?

At any given moment, people all over the world are posting and reading online reviews about hotels, restaurants, cars, and more. Reviews influence important decisions and experiences and have financial, personal, and social consequences. Reviews should accurately reflect the writer’s experience so that readers can make more informed decisions. Our research on hundreds of thousands of hotel reviews shows that this is not quite the case. We found that random changes in weather, even days after staying in a hotel, significantly affected the content and rating of the review. In other words, factors unrelated to the experience itself caused the writer, probably due to a change in mood, to write a review that did not represent their actual experience. This can have a big impact on businesses and digital platforms such as shopping sites and social media.