The importance of reviews on a hotel's online reputation does not require special introductions. We can ask ourselves, however, how much it is.
According to a research by BrightLocal, 85% of the guests believe online reviews exactly as much as the recommendations made by friends and family.
This aggregated data is only one of the results of the study carried out on the reputation of more than 50,000 companies in the United States, based on the online reviews collected from 2012 to 2017 and divided by platform.
Looking at the data in the form of graphs, the rise of Google is nothing short of impressive.
 
The extraordinary growth of Google
Google's efforts in recent years to enter the field of "local" reviews have borne fruit: growth in the number of annual reviews has been at the limits of the exponential.
From 2013 to 2014, the number of reviews grew by 80% while the following year by 114%. In 2016 BrightLocal recorded an increase of 278% on an annual basis.
The research has suggested three reasons behind this phenomenon:
• Google owns the search engine par excellence, so anyone looking for a local business has the option to leave a review directly from the SERP;
• Google's native integration on Android allowed the company to show Google My Business reviews to millions of users on smartphones every day;
• Google actively pushes its users to write reviews, greatly increasing notifications on smartphones after visiting a hotel.
Google does not offer the most numerically supplied online review platform, but certainly the most visible one. For this reason, many companies are increasingly pushing their customers to leave feedback on Google compared to other platforms, with the results that we can see below.
Seeing this chart, Google's push from mid-2016 is evident, with a further surge in the second quarter of 2017. Maybe the current ubiquity of reviews on Google will slow down the growth of the platform, but currently the data does not seem corroborate this hypothesis.
 
Facebook recovers from the review crisis
Google is not the only platform to have seen significant growth in the number of reviews. Facebook has increased the volume of reviews in a manner not dissimilar, encouraging users to register their position on the platform as soon as they entered the hotel and requesting a review immediately afterwards.

Facebook was the leader in the growth of reviews until 2014, but then underwent a significant slowdown that lasted until the third quarter of 2016. The increasingly less prominent position of the message boards of the pages in the browsing experience on Facebook had penalized the reviews, go into the background.
With the right corrections, however, Facebook saw 71% more reviews in 2016 compared to 2015, with 2017 results even more impressive.
 
TripAdvisor is always TripAdvisor
Google and Facebook have definitely grown as platforms for a hotel's online reputation, but that does not mean that TripAdvisor is not yet the king of the industry. And with wide, very wide margin.
Each hotel has an average of 47.5 new reviews per year on TripAdvisor, three times higher than those received on average on Google My Business.
Despite the progress made by the competition, TripAdvisor remains the first barometer of a hotel's online reputation.