Keep it Clean: The Increasing Importance of Hotel Cleanliness According to Guest Reviews

There is little doubt that topics like safety, public health, hygiene, and cleanliness have been on everyone’s minds since the beginning of the pandemic. The hospitality industry is no exception to this trend, as we recently discussed in our latest webinar, The Power of TrustYou. It is clear that topics like face masks, social distancing, covid, hotel cleanliness, safety, etc. have been at the top of the list of guest concerns. So how does this reflect on the feedback that guests have left after their stays? What trends have emerged in the past couple of years? 

Let’s have a look at the data. TrustYou analyzed over 14 Million reviews in the English language, between November 2020 and July 2021, to understand how the perception of guests has evolved with respect to these relevant topics. The results already reveal quite an interesting trend. 

On the one hand, mentions of words around public health topics have remained not only relatively low, but constant throughout this time frame as we can see on the lower graphs. For example, 4.7% of the reviews in English mention the word covid, 2.5% the words safe, safety, or safely and only 0.9% of reviews mention masks or face masks.

These continue to be quite relevant topics and keywords throughout the pandemic, but they do not seem to have such a significant impact as another very prominent topic: cleanliness and hygiene. As it can be seen from this graph, mentions of keywords related to this cleanliness have steadily increased between November 2020 and July 2021. On our data set of 14 Million English reviews, a staggering 25.5% of the reviews mention either the word “clean”, “cleaned” or “cleanliness”. That is one out of every 4 reviews! 

It seems then, that guests have an increased interest in the overall hygiene of hotels and the diverse topics around cleanliness. But is this increased attention towards cleanliness perceived as positive or negative by hotel guests?

To answer this question, check out our follow-up article next week, or check out The Power of TrustYou, now available to watch on-demand!