
Machine Learning over 1M hotel reviews - feconroses
https://blog.monkeylearn.com/machine-learning-1m-hotel-reviews-finds-interesting-insights/
======
11thEarlOfMar
"Interestingly, ‘Internet’ doesn’t really rise above 70% in any hotel class,
indicating that internet access is as bad in 3 star hotels as in 5 star
hotels. One would expect that more expensive hotels would provide a better
internet service, but If you’ve ever stayed at a 5 star hotel you know that’s
not usually the case..."

The more stars the Hotel has the more likely you have to pay for WiFi. If I
have to pay for it, I expect it to perform better than if it's free. So I'm
going to diss it harder if it is not fast and consistent.

~~~
segmondy
More stars tend to mean more expensive, usually where most corporate travel
would stay. Those wifi? they write it off on their expense rewards or get it
for free with hotel reward cards. They rest of normal folks wanting to stay at
very nice hotel pay for it. They charge for it because people pay, same way
airlines charge for every stupid thing today and people pay.

~~~
ArkyBeagle
I have consistently and for a long time wondered what "corporate travel" is
thinking of when they offer a list of accommodations. Then again, I sort of
hate "very nice hotels". They look like TV soap opera sets which is annoying.

------
krmmalik
There are some amazing hotels in London. I've had some amazing experiences. My
own observation may be anecdotal but i think this comes down to what each
dollar gets you for your money. $150 in London gets you an average hotel. $150
in Bangkok gets you something top notch. Chances are most of the analysis has
been done at fixed price points, not accounting for relative value. That would
explain why London rates poorer.

~~~
Erwin
Berlin, Lisbon, Budapest and Bruxelles are some of those cities where you can
stay at a 5-star extremely cheap.

London's the worst for it; I have never been happy with the cheaper 5-star
(less than 260 GBP/night) hotels there. Maybe if you stay at Mandarin
Oriental...

On the other hand the restaurants are a great value, especially lunch menus:
save the 100 GBP on the 5-star hotel and spend 55 GBP (+12.5% "optional"
gratuity) on a 3-course lunch menu, with 2 glasses of wine and coffee at an
amazing 2-Michelin-star restaurant like "The Square". You'll still have enough
for a last-minute good half-price theatre ticket at tkts.co.uk in the evening.

------
splonk
I can corroborate some of the high level factoids in this. I work for a
company with a large set of hotel sentiment data that should be a superset of
the data in the linked post. It's probably around 35M reviews over several
major sites.

82% of sentiments being positive sounds plausible. Ours is somewhat lower but
still well over 50%. I think it's in the 70s. Practically speaking, I've had
some really frustrating conversations with people in the industry trying to
explain that a hotel can have positive sentiment and still be way below
average for a given cohort.

Wifi sucks - that matches our data. Within the most common entities we
extract, the only thing worse than wifi is "maintenance", which has a much
lower occurrence rate. Unsurprisingly, nobody really talks about maintenance
unless something's broken. Location is generally highly rated. Surprisingly to
me, so is "service" and equivalents.

Anecdotally, the croissant thing sounds correct. A lot of reviewers use the
example of cold croissants to describe an unimpressive continental breakfast.

~~~
carterehsmith
Ah, hotel Wi-Fi... maybe it's not as good as the one at home because... "in
theory" you don't need it as much?

Like, if you are a family on vacation @ beautiful Aruba, maybe management
thinks that you will spend time on the beach, or golfing, or in spa or using
any other of their 60+ carefully tended-to amenities?

Perhaps they can't imagine the whole family sitting in their hotel room for 14
hours a day with 4 iDevices spread across Netflix/Youtube/Twitch, everyone
complaining that they can't get more than 720p.

Lol, who knows.

------
minimaxir
The cross-group results are close enough that you _really_ need to use
confidence intervals for the proportions, even with the large sample size.
Especially because sentiment analysis does not perfectly classify
positivity/negativity.

On a semi-related note, TripAdvisor will likely not appreciate you scraping 1M
reviews, especially since even their officially-sanctioned API explicitly says
"you can't use this for data analysis." ([https://developer-
tripadvisor.com/content-api/request-api-ac...](https://developer-
tripadvisor.com/content-api/request-api-access/))

------
inopinatus
Isn't it an overreach to make absolute statements from sentiment analysis?
There are some bold claims in this article that can only stand if the authors
corrected for anchoring, confirmation bias, and herd behaviour.

~~~
doppenhe
I also believe that people with bad experiences tend to review hotels more
often than those with good experiences. That would bias the entire data set in
one way or the other (obviously this has nothing to do with the quality of the
tool being presented).

------
devcpp
A more accurate conclusion would be that London's bad hotels are a popular
option.

During my tour around Europe, I quickly realized that all the hotels in the
City of London (other than extremely expensive ones) are very cheap but also
awful.

------
nzjrs
How do we feel that they stole that data against the TOS?

~~~
rfrey
When I was in second grade, there was a rule in the school library that grades
1-3 were only allowed in section A, grades 4-6 were allowed in section B. I
regularly crawled around the barricade so I could read the Hardy Boys books
and the Great Brain stories that were squirrelled away there. I got caught
several times and bawled out, but I never felt bad.

But I still feel worse about that than this TOS violation.

------
WhitneyLand
Is this a really great example of Machine Learning? It seems most of the work
could have been done with common data stores and a bit of coding.

------
guard-of-terra
They could have provided richer graphs, more of them, or at least a link
towards a firehose of results. Maybe I'm missing something?

~~~
minimaxir
As is the trend in 2016, the article serves as promotional content marketing
for the startup OP works for, by using data that cannot be questioned.

It is a personal pet peeve and one of the reasons I make all my statistical
analyses open source. (That being said, in this case, the OP does have a
notebook available on GitHub)

------
kijeda
Out of how many cities? They only present 7.

------
ars
I found this line interesting:

"Some trial and error followed for getting the best model for the data"

Unlike AI a human can do that at a glance, with no prior training.

~~~
megaframe
"with no prior training"

is a false statement, the prior training is life and learning to read and
having human experiences. For example if all reviews were in english and the
human only spoke Mandarin they would need "prior training" before being able
to preform the task.

~~~
ars
I don't mean training on the dataset. I mean training on the model, i.e.
knowing what to pick to train on.

------
tomc1985
Based on my own personal experiences... fuck London. People are rude and
indifferent to you. The hostels are all retarded, overpriced pubs. British
food is terrible. Everything is overpriced, even by NY/SF/European standards.
Even the UK hates Londoners

~~~
neximo64
Gee, I wonder why people are rude to you?

It is my experience that the people are cold and indifferent, but once they
warm up to you, you have a fantastic relationship with them that is above
superficial and stands the test of time.

~~~
tomc1985
Well, when your UK friends from other parts of the commonwealth tear into
Londoners worse than you do, perhaps the problem is indeed with them?

When you're passing through it is hard to get to know anyone.

London is by far the worst treatment I have seen from anyone in the western
world, rich or poor. Even city Dutch are nicer and more kind.

~~~
throwaway-hn123
No, the problem is with you.

