Guest Experience Index
The innovative score that gives you a quick picture of your online reputation
What is the Guest Experience Index™?
The Guest Experience Index (GEI) indicates guests’ general perceptions of your hotel quality. We use data from 30 review sites and Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) in conjunction with a proprietary algorithm, developed by Olery in cooperation with the VU University Amsterdam, to calculate a general weighted score on a scale from 1 to 100 (with 100 being the perfect top score).
The GEI score is more than just the average of all review scores. There are a few important factors that are taken into account when calculating the GEI and weighting the score.
Integrity of the review site
Some review sites have a very low bar for reviewers to jump over before they can post an entry. Others are more discerning. For example, TripAdvisor allows anyone to post reviews, requiring no proof that the reviewer actually stayed at the hotel in question or even is who they say they are.
By contrast, Booking.com only permits reviews from guests who have used their booking service to reserve rooms in the first place. Because of this additional level of consideration, ratings from Booking.com are weighted more heavily in the GEI calculation than those from TripAdvisor.
Integrity of the reviewer
Some reviewers travel often and frequently write reviews about their experiences. Others may leave a single review and then never return to the website. Whose hotel review would you be more likely to trust? We’d agree that the more-traveled reviewer is more likely to have better insights—so we weigh their ratings more heavily for the GEI.
Relative age of the review
The GEI is calculated as a weighted moving average over the last 90 days. This means that only the reviews from the last three months are taken into account, and newer reviews are weighted a bit more heavily than older reviews
What Guest Experience Index score should I aim for?
The average GEI score generally falls between 60 and 80. To rank among the top hotels in your area, you’ll want to get your score somewhere above 80. If your score’s currently below 60, you know you’ve got some catching up to do.