Expedia’s Guest Experience Score: A Key Metric for Hotels

"Opening a New Perspective on Hotel Service In the world of travel and hospitality, hotels are not just places to stay but experiences that guests will remember for a lifetime. For many years, hotels often focused on meas…"

Expedia’s Guest Experience Score: A Key Metric for Hotels

Over the past several years, many hotels have focused mainly on only the “Guest Review Score” or customer review score. But today, Expedia has placed importance on another metric that directly affects a hotel’s Visibility and Revenue, which is the Guest Experience Score (GEX)

This score does not only measure “whether guests like the hotel” but measures “whether the hotel can deliver the experience as it was sold” and importantly… if the Guest Experience Score is below 85, the hotel may not be able to participate in Expedia’s important Campaigns, such as the One Key Cash Program, which clearly affects visibility, price competitiveness, and Conversion

 

What is Guest Experience Score?

Expedia uses 1 year of historical data to calculate the score, with “recent incidents” having a greater impact on the score than older incidents, allowing hotels to recover their scores quickly if problems are addressed seriously

The factors that Expedia uses to calculate the Guest Experience Score include Preventable Refunds, Cleanliness, Preventable Relocations, Property Conditions and Facilities, Preventable Cancellations, Check-in

The factors with the heaviest impact: Preventable Relocations and Preventable Refunds Although many hotels focus on reviews, in reality Expedia gives very high “weight” to problems that directly affect the Guest Journey

 

Preventable Relocations — The Number One Score Destroyer

This refers to cases where guests arrive at the hotel and there is “no room available for them to stay” and they have to be moved to another hotel due to preventable issues such as Overbooking, closing for renovation without updating the system, Inventory Sync errors, or closing certain Room Types while still keeping them available for sale. Expedia states that this factor has a “Very High” Weight and should have a rate of less than 0.1% because for guests, being Relocated is not just “inconvenient” but can ruin the entire trip, especially in tourist cities where rooms are fully booked or during High Season

Preventable Refunds — Refunds That Should Not Happen

Another important variable is Refunds caused by poor experiences that could have been prevented, such as unclean rooms, unusable facilities, rooms not matching what was sold, Noise Complaints, broken Air-conditioning, Maintenance Issues. Expedia views a Refund request as a sign that the Guest Experience has “failed” and often leads to negative reviews in the future as well

What many hotels still misunderstand Many hotels think that “if the Review Score is still good, there is no problem” but in reality, a hotel may have a review score of 8.5/10 while its Guest Experience Score is below the standard if there are incidents such as frequent customer Cancellations, guest Relocations, many Refunds, repeated Guest Complaints, and regular Check-in problems. Expedia considers “Operational Reliability” to be just as important as “Guest Satisfaction”

 

What does Guest Experience Score affect?

This score affects many things, such as Visibility on Expedia, Campaign Eligibility, participation in promotional programs, Conversion Rate, and the credibility of the Property, especially Campaigns such as the One Key Cash Program that many hotels want to join to increase Exposure and bookings. If the score is below 85, the hotel may be restricted from participating in these Campaigns

 

What should hotels focus on first?

• Reduce Overbooking to close to 0% Sync Inventory with every OTA Monitor Stop Sell Check Mapping and Connectivity
• Fix Maintenance issues before guests encounter them Preventive Maintenance is very important Do not release rooms with problems for sale
• Communicate before guests travel If there is Renovation, Pool Closure, Facility Limitation, this should be communicated in advance to reduce Cancellation and Refund
• Monitor In-house Complaints in Real-time Expedia recommends resolving problems within 24 hours Many times Guests will not request a Refund if the hotel can resolve the problem in time

In this era, OTAs no longer measure only “whether reviews are good” but are measuring whether hotels can “deliver the experience consistently” or not. Guest Experience Score has therefore become a new KPI that Revenue, Front Office, Reservation, and Operation teams must take care of together, because in the end, a hotel that sells well on OTAs is not just a hotel with “beautiful reviews” but a hotel that is the most “Operationally Reliable” in the eyes of platforms like Expedia

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