The weight of a review: Assessing Booking.com’s new scoring system

This study examines Booking.com’s January 2025 update to its review scoring system, which shifts from an arithmetic mean of all guest reviews over the past 3 years to a weighted algorithm. The new system prioritizes recent reviews while reducing the impact of older ones. Using a sample of 100 Spanish hotels and 74,882 reviews, we identify the weighting scheme: 85% for reviews from the last 12-month period, 10% for previous year, and 5% for the year before that. Our findings indicate a minimal overall impact on hotel ratings, with most properties undergoing a variation of less than 0.1 points out of 10. While the updated system provides a more dynamic reflection of current service quality, it also introduces risks, such as increased vulnerability to fraudulent reviews and short-term fluctuations. This change poses challenges for academic studies on hotel reputation and highlights the need for greater transparency in algorithmic scoring systems.